BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

Vendor BoFs
Want to demonstrate a new product or discuss your company's latest technologies with FAST attendees? Host a Vendor BoF! These sponsored one-hour sessions give companies a chance to talk about products and proprietary technology—and they include promotional benefits. Email sponsorship@usenix.org if you're interested in sponsoring a Vendor BoF. Click here for more information about sponsorship opportunities.

Scheduling a BoF
To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area. If you have a description of our BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "FAST '11 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (as of February 17, 2011)
For the most current schedule, please see the BoF Boards in the registration area.

BoF Descriptions

File Systems: More Work to Do to Standardize?
SNIA Technical Council
Tuesday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m., Willow Glen I/II

The SNIA Technical Council would like you invite you to participate in an open discussion of what standardization is needed in file system development. Questions posed may include topics such as: Is POSIX enough? What standardization is/should be done with file system metadata? What features should be standard elements of a file system (vs. add-on)? 

NFSv4.1/pNFS: The Way to Users' Adoption and What's Next
Sorin Faibish, EMC; Peter Honeyman, CITI; and others
Wednesday, February 16, 7:45 p.m.–8:45 p.m., Willow Glen II

Early last year the NFSv4.1/pNFS protocol was approved by IETF and many vendors and open source community are working very hard on the implementations. But without users interested in the usage of the protocol there is no protocol. As such the adoption of pNFS is very important as a sign of the success of the protocol. In this BoF we will try to present an update on the status of current implementations as well as showing some preliminary detaiuls on several client/server implementations. We will also try to discuss the planning for the future versions of NFSv4.x and ask the attendence of additional features neded.

Rackspace Vendor BoF
Anthony Young, Cloud Software Engineer
Wednesday, February 16, 7:45 p.m.–8:45 p.m., Willow Glen III

Anthony is a software engineer that works on Rackspace's cloud initiatives. He came to Rackspace through the acquisition of Ansolabs, the software company that created Nova, the cloud computing fabric that powers NASA's Nebula project. Prior to Ansolabs, he led the Web Technologies group of Tapulous, which was bought by Disney in 2010. Anthony also co-founded the web browser Flock (recently acquired by Zynga) and DanceJam.com.

Microsoft Recruiting BoF
Wednesday, February 16, 8:45 p.m.–9:45 p.m., Willow Glen I

Microsoft is hiring for Storage positions! We're looking for B.S., M.S., and PhD candidates, and experienced applicants for full-time jobs and internships in various storage-focused product groups at Microsoft. Come learn what it takes to engineer storage protocols (client-server, and server-server), drivers, file systems, and other components for Windows client and server operating systems, applications, and cloud services (Azure, Hotmail), with the quality demanded for installed instances in the hundreds of millions. Roles include software developer, test, and program management. 

College recruits should visit www.microsoft.com/university. All applicants can visit www.microsoft.com/jobs to view current openings.

There will be a drawing for a Microsoft Xbox with Kinect motion sensor; you must be present to win.

PRObE: A 1000+ Node Systems Research Testbed to be Available in 2011
Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University and Panasas Inc.
Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Robert Ricci, University of Utah
Andree Jacobson, New Mexico Consortium
Katharine Chartrand, New Mexico Consortium
Wednesday, February 16, 8:45 p.m.–9:45 p.m., Willow Glen II

This BoF will review status, plans, organization, and solicit participation for PRObE. PRObE is an NSF-sponsored project aimed at providing a large-scale, low-level systems research facility. PRObE will provide a highly reconfigurable, remotely accessible and controllable environment that researchers can use to perform experiments that are not possible at a smaller scale. PRObE at full production scale provides at least two 1024 node clusters, one more of 200 nodes, and some smaller machines with extreme core count and bleeding edge technology. The PRObE software environment will be based on Emulab. Most machines are retired large clusters donated by DOE facilities and housed primarily at the New Mexico Consortium in Los Alamos, NM. PRObE is dedicated to systems research. The computer facility allows hands-on operation of very large computing resources. Researchers will have complete control of the hardware while they are running experiments. Researchers can inject both hardware and software failures while monitoring the system to see how it reacts to such failures. We envision this unique system will support research in many systems related fields such as Operating Systems, Storage, and High End Computing.  

Benchmarking and Tracing: New Horizons
Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University and Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College
Wednesday, February 16, 8:45 p.m.–9:45 p.m., Willow Glen III

In this BoF we would like to discuss the challenges in file system and storage benchmarking and tracing. We will discuss the shortcomings of modern benchmarks, serious  problems that they can cause and the ways to make benchmarks better. In this light, we will present some relevant modifications to the popular Filebench benchmark and discuss the right way to run this test suite. We will discuss updates and enhancements we have made to our version of Filebench we've been maintaining for the past year. Tracing is an important part of developing a realistic benchmark, but it is often considered independently from the benchmarking. We would like to discuss these two areas together and highlight how tracing can make benchmarking more efficient, accurate and realistic. Geoff Kuenning, the co-chair of SNIA IOTTA Technical Working Group, will share his experience on working with traces and give an update about the status of IOTTA trace repository.

Linux Storage & File Systems Update
Ric Wheeler, Red Hat
Wednesday, February 16, 9:45 p.m.–10:45 p.m., Willow Glen I