Overview

The 22nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '24) brings together storage-system researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of storage systems. The program committee interprets "storage systems" broadly: submissions on low-level storage devices, distributed storage systems, and information management are all of interest. The conference will consist of technical presentations including refereed papers, and poster sessions. As with recent conferences, several papers may be selected for fast tracking to a special section/issue of ACM’s Transaction on Storage journal (ACM TOS)

Topics

Topics of interest to FAST should include files and/or storage, and may overlap with other topics including, but not limited to:

    Archival systems
    Auditing and provenance
    AI for storage and storage for AI
    Big data, analytics, and data sciences
    Caching, replication, and consistency
    Cloud, multi- and hybrid-cloud environments
    Data deduplication
    Database storage
    Distributed and networked storage (wide-area, grid, peer-to-peer)
    Emerging memory hierarchy design
    Empirical evaluation
    Experience with deployed systems
    File system design
    HPC systems (including parallel I/O)
    Key-value and NoSQL storage
    Management
    Memory-only storage systems
    Mobile, personal, embedded, and home storage
    Networking
    Novel and emerging storage technologies (e.g., DNA storage)
    Performance and QoS
    Power-aware storage architectures
    RAID and erasure coding
    Reliability, availability, and disaster tolerance
    Search and data retrieval
    Security

In evaluating the fit of a paper for FAST, a key ingredient is the design of storage software. A paper with only hardware-level contributions will be out-of-scope; a paper could be brought into scope for FAST by demonstrating for example how software can leverage novel hardware.