USENIX FAST
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| USENIX FAST | |
|---|---|
| Name | FAST |
| Organizer | USENIX Association |
| Discipline | Computer science |
| Frequency | Annual/Biennial |
| First | 2002 |
| Location | Varies (United States, occasionally international) |
USENIX FAST FAST is a leading academic conference focused on file and storage technologies, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and vendors. It serves as a venue for dissemination of novel results in storage systems, filesystems, and related infrastructure, and for cross-pollination among academic labs, corporate research groups, and standards bodies. The conference has influenced designs in operating systems, datacenter architecture, and embedded devices.
Overview
FAST convenes researchers from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Washington alongside industry teams from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon (company), and IBM. Typical topics intersect with work produced at venues like ACM SOSP, USENIX OSDI, ACM ASPLOS, ACM SIGCOMM, and IEEE FAST conferences. The program commonly includes paper presentations, keynotes by figures from Intel, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, and Samsung Electronics, and tutorials developed with contributions from groups at Oracle Corporation, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Dropbox (service).
History and Development
The conference emerged from earlier gatherings and workshops that connected researchers from Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard, and university labs in the late 20th century. Founders and early organizers included contributors with ties to University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Toronto, Cornell University, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Over time FAST evolved alongside milestones like the introduction of RAID, the commercialization of SSD, the rise of cloud computing driven by Amazon Web Services, and the development of distributed filesystems such as Google File System and Hadoop Distributed File System. The program has reflected shifts caused by hardware advances from Micron Technology, proposals from ACM SIGOPS, and standards influenced by IEEE Standards Association.
Conferences and Workshops
FAST programs often feature co-located workshops and tutorials with organizers from Tsinghua University, ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore, Microsoft Research, and Google Research. Past keynote speakers and panelists have included researchers affiliated with Facebook AI Research, Apple Inc., NetApp Research, Bell Labs Research, and AT&T Labs. Workshops have covered topics also explored at EuroSys, SOSP Workshop, USENIX Security Symposium, and KubeCon and have attracted participants from Red Hat, VMware, NVIDIA, and ARM Holdings.
Research Areas and Topics
FAST addresses subjects spanning storage-stack design and evaluation, including research related to flash memory technologies commercialized by Samsung Electronics and Western Digital, persistent memory initiatives from Intel and Micron Technology, and erasure coding strategies used by Backblaze and Dropbox (service). Papers examine interactions with operating systems such as Linux kernel and virtualization platforms like Xen (software) and KVM. Work at FAST often references systems and projects including Ceph, ZFS, Btrfs, Lustre (file system), and RAID architectures, and builds on techniques used in MapReduce, Apache Hadoop, and Spark (software). Security and forensics topics link to efforts at SANS Institute and CERT Coordination Center, while performance measurement methods draw on benchmarks popularized by SPEC and TPC (organization).
Publication and Peer Review Process
FAST employs a peer-review process managed by program committees composed of researchers from Princeton University, University of California, San Diego, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, and University of Cambridge. Submissions undergo blind review with reviewers drawn from academic labs and industry research groups including Google Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and Facebook AI Research. Accepted papers are published in conference proceedings distributed by the USENIX Association and archived alongside collections from USENIX Security, LISA, and NSDI (conference). The conference enforces artifact evaluation similar to practices at PLDI and OOPSLA to encourage reproducibility.
Awards and Recognition
FAST presents awards for best paper, best paper runner-up, and sometimes community awards recognizing influential contributions; recipients have been affiliated with Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, Google, Intel, and NetApp. Distinguished papers from FAST have later received citations and prizes at venues such as ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame and have informed award-winning products from EMC Corporation and Pure Storage. Program committee chairs and notable contributors have held leadership roles in organizations like ACM and IEEE.
Impact and Industry Adoption
Research presented at FAST has influenced filesystem implementations in Linux kernel, storage arrays from Dell Technologies, distributed storage systems at Facebook, and cloud storage services at Amazon (company) and Google Cloud Platform. Techniques from FAST papers have been adopted in open-source projects such as Ceph and Btrfs and have guided standards discussions in IEEE. The conference has also shaped graduate curricula at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University, and supported collaborations between labs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and industrial research groups at Bell Labs.