INVITATION FROM THE PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS

Dear Colleague,

We are writing to invite you to attend the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09), February 24–27, in San Francisco, 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 '09 will bring together storage specialists from all of these areas in a unified, high-quality forum.

The FAST program again offers tutorials. Taking place on Tuesday, February 24, the four half-day tutorials give you the opportunity to learn from leaders in the storage industry including:

• Clustered and Parallel Storage System Technologies Brent Welch and Marc Unangst, Panasas
• Security and Usability: What Do We Know? Simson Garfinkel, Naval Postgraduate School
• Storage Class Memory, Technology, and Uses Richard Freitas, Winfried Wilcke, Bulent Kurdi, and Geoffrey Burr, IBM Almaden Research Center
• Web-Scale Data Management Christopher Olston and Benjamin Reed, Yahoo! Research

The technical program includes 23 technical papers, as well as a keynote address, Work-in-Progress reports (WiPs), and a poster session.

The papers represent some of the outstanding work in the area, with topics including meta-data and optimization, distributed storage, data integrity, and more.

The FAST technical sessions will include a session for Work-in-Progress reports, preliminary results, and "outrageous" opinion statements. We are particularly interested in presentations of student work. To submit, please send a one-page abstract, which should be in PDF format with fonts no smaller than 10 points and 3/4-inch margins, to fast09wips@usenix.org by 11:59 p.m. PST on Thursday, January 29, 2009.

The poster session will allow researchers to present recent and ongoing projects. The poster session is an excellent forum to discuss new ideas and get useful feedback from the community. Proposed posters should be described with a one-page abstract of the research in PDF format, with fonts no smaller than 10 points and 3/4-inch margins. Send poster proposals to fast09posters@usenix.org by 11:59 p.m. PST on Thursday, January 29, 2009.

FAST '09 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 Francisco. Please register today.

On behalf of the FAST '09 Program Committee,

Margo Seltzer, Harvard University
Ric Wheeler, Red Hat
FAST '09 Program Co-Chairs
fast09chairs@usenix.org

P.S. Don't miss the 1st Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP '09), taking place February 23, 2009, San Francisco, CA, co-located with FAST '09.