2008 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award
Sponsored by the IBM Almaden Research Center
Presented by the 2008 IEEE President, Lewis Terman

"It's like a fire. You just have to move on": Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving
Cathy Marshall, Senior Researcher, Microsoft

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Many consumers engage in magical thinking when it comes to the long-term fate of their digital stuff. A strategy that hinges on benign neglect coupled with lots of copies seems to be the best we can hope for. Yet if we take a fresh look at what real people do, it becomes possible to reframe personal digital archiving as more than a battle with burgeoning file formats and media obsolescence, and a push toward trusted repositories—"storage in the cloud." I will discuss four pervasive themes of personal digital archiving that have emerged from recent studies and try my best to convince you that this is a problem whose time has come.

Pergamum: Replacing Tape with Energy Efficient, Reliable, Disk-Based Archival Storage
Mark W. Storer, Kevin M. Greenan, and Ethan L. Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz; Kaladhar Voruganti, Network Appliance

Scalable Performance of the Panasas Parallel File System
Brent Welch, Marc Unangst, and Zainul Abbasi, Panasas, Inc.; Garth Gibson, Panasas, Inc., and Carnegie Mellon University; Brian Mueller, Jason Small, Jim Zelenka, and Bin Zhou, Panasas, Inc.

TierStore: A Distributed Filesystem for Challenged Networks in Developing Regions
Michael Demmer, Bowei Du, and Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley

On Multi-level Exclusive Caching: Offline Optimality and Why Promotions Are Better Than Demotions
Binny S. Gill, IBM Almaden Research Center

AWOL: An Adaptive Write Optimizations Layer
Alexandros Batsakis and Randal Burns, Johns Hopkins University; Arkady Kanevsky, James Lentini, and Thomas Talpey, Network Appliance™ Inc.

TaP: Table-based Prefetching for Storage Caches
Mingju Li, Elizabeth Varki, and Swapnil Bhatia, University of New Hampshire; Arif Merchant, Hewlett-Packard Labs

The FAST technical sessions included a session for Work-in-Progress reports, preliminary results, and "outrageous" opinion statements. The abstracts, slides, and audio files of the FAST '08 WiPs are available here.

Held in conjunction with a happy hour, the poster and demo session will allow researchers to present recent and ongoing projects. The list of accepted posters is now available.

Sustainable Information Technology Ecosystem
Chandrakant D. Patel, HP Fellow, Hewlett-Packard Labs

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The next generation of information technology services will be driven by an ecosystem made up of billions of service-oriented handheld devices and thousands of data centers. The IT ecosystem must address the fundamental needs of society while reducing the destruction of available energy when compared to conventional ways of conducting business. This applies in particular to IT services in growth economies where users are eager to use IT to improve the quality of life. To enable "IT as a weapon" for the masses while producing a net-positive impact on the environment, we need to devise a least-material and least-energy approach to IT solutions.

We propose an approach that traces the lifecycle of IT solutions based on the second law of thermodynamics. This "cradle-to-cradle" method calculates the cost in Joules of available energy destroyed to provide a uniform framework to compare the sustainability of IT solutions with respect to conventional approaches. We will probe the design of computer and storage hardware and services in view of inflections in the technologies and their impact from a thermo-mechanical point of view. We will call for a multidisciplinary community to develop a sustainable global IT ecosystem by fusing the least-materials and least-energy approaches.

The RAID-6 Liberation Codes
James S. Plank, University of Tennessee

Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics
Weihang Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, and Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Arkady Kanevsky, Network Appliance, Inc.

Parity Lost and Parity Regained
Andrew Krioukov and Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Garth R. Goodson, Kiran Srinivasan, and Randy Thelen, Network Appliance, Inc.; Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Enhancing Storage System Availability on Multi-Core Architectures with Recovery-Conscious Scheduling
Sangeetha Seshadri, Georgia Institute of Technology; Lawrence Chiu, Cornel Constantinescu, Subashini Balachandran, and Clem Dickey, IBM Almaden Research Center; Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology; Paul Muench, IBM Almaden Research Center

Improving I/O Performance of Applications through Compiler-Directed Code Restructuring
Mahmut Kandemir and Seung Woo Son, Pennsylvania State University; Mustafa Karakoy, Imperial College

Measurement and Analysis of TCP Throughput Collapse in Cluster-based Storage Systems
Amar Phanishayee, Elie Krevat, Vijay Vasudevan, David G. Andersen, Gregory R. Ganger, Garth A. Gibson, and Srinivasan Seshan, Carnegie Mellon University

Awarded Best Paper!
Portably Solving File TOCTTOU Races with Hardness Amplification
Dan Tsafrir, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Tomer Hertz, Microsoft Research; David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley; Dilma Da Silva, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

EIO: Error Handling is Occasionally Correct
Haryadi S. Gunawi, Cindy Rubio-González, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Ben Liblit, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Awarded Best Student Paper!
An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack
Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Garth Goodson, Network Appliance, Inc.; Bianca Schroeder, University of Toronto; Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison

BPLRU: A Buffer Management Scheme for Improving Random Writes in Flash Storage
Hyojun Kim and Seongjun Ahn, Software Laboratory of Samsung Electronics, Korea

Write Off-Loading: Practical Power Management for Enterprise Storage
Dushyanth Narayanan, Austin Donnelly, and Antony Rowstron, Microsoft Research Ltd.

Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck in the Data Domain Deduplication File System
Benjamin Zhu, Data Domain, Inc.; Kai Li, Data Domain, Inc., and Princeton University; Hugo Patterson, Data Domain, Inc.

Towards Tamper-evident Storage on Patterned Media
Pieter H. Hartel, Leon Abelmann, and Mohammed G. Khatib, University of Twente, The Netherlands

SWEEPER: An Efficient Disaster Recovery Point Identification Mechanism
Akshat Verma, IBM India Research; Kaladhar Voruganti, Network Appliance; Ramani Routray, IBM Almaden Research; Rohit Jain, Yahoo India

Using Utility to Provision Storage Systems
John D. Strunk, Carnegie Mellon University; Eno Thereska, Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK; Christos Faloutsos and Gregory R. Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University