INVITATION FROM THE PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS

Dear Colleague,

We are writing to invite you to attend the 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '10), February 23–26, 2010, in San Jose, California.

File systems and storage continue to be active focus areas for researchers and technologists in operating systems, computer architecture, distributed systems, networking, mobile computing, and computational science. FAST '10 will bring together file and storage specialists from all of these areas in a unified, high-quality forum.

The FAST program again offers tutorials. Taking place on Tuesday, February 23, the four half-day tutorials give you the opportunity to learn from leaders in the storage industry:

• Storage Virtualization and the Utility Model
  Tom Clark, Brocade Communications
• Solid-State Storage: Technology, Design, and Application
  Richard Freitas and Larry Chiu, IBM Almaden Research Center
• Storage and Network Deduplication Technologies
  Michael Condict, NetApp
• Clustered and Parallel Storage System Technologies
  Brent Welch and Marc Unangst, Panasas

The technical program includes 21 technical papers, as well as two keynote addresses, Work-in-Progress reports (WiPs), and a poster session.

The papers represent some of the outstanding work in the area, with topics including flash storage, deduplication, energy-conscious systems, errors and problem diagnoses, and more.

FAST will include sessions for Work-in-Progress reports and posters, to allow researchers to present recent and ongoing projects, preliminary results, and "outrageous" opinion statements. We are particularly interested in presentations of student work. To submit, please send a one-page abstract, in PDF format with fonts no smaller than 10 points and 3/4-inch margins, to fast10wips@usenix.org or fast10posters@usenix.org, by 11:59 p.m. PST (UTC-8) on Thursday, January 28, 2010. More specific guidelines can be found here.

FAST '10 promises to be an exciting conference presenting leading examples of current research and a strong vision of the future of file and storage technologies.

We hope you will join us in San Jose. Please register today.

On behalf of the FAST '10 Program Committee,

Randal Burns, Johns Hopkins University
Kimberly Keeton, Hewlett-Packard Labs
FAST '10 Program Co-Chairs
fast10chairs@usenix.org