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.

http://www.usenix.org/fast09/proga

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 (AT) usenix (DOT) 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 (AT) usenix (DOT) 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 visit the conference Web
site at http://www.usenix.org/fast09/proga to register today.

On behalf of the FAST '09 Program Committee,

Margo Seltzer, Harvard University
Ric Wheeler, Red Hat
FAST '09 Program Co-Chairs
fast09chairs (AT) usenix (DOT) 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.
http://www.usenix.org/events/tapp09/

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7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09)
February 24-27, 2009
San Francisco, CA
http://www.usenix.org/fast09/proga
Early Bird Registration Deadline: February 9, 2009
Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGOPS, IEEE Mass Storage
Systems Technical Committee (MSSTC), and IEEE TCOS
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