Overview
The 10th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '12) brings together storage-system researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of storage systems. The program committee will interpret "storage systems" broadly; everything from low-level storage devices to information management is of interest. The conference will consist of technical presentations, including refereed papers, Work-in-Progress (WiP) reports, poster sessions, and tutorials.

Beginning this year, FAST will also feature a short-paper track. Short papers must represent completed work and will be reviewed to the same quality standards as full papers. They should describe smaller ideas that can be fully expressed in half the space of a full-length paper. Short papers will be published in the proceedings, and authors will be allocated a (shorter) talk slot during the conference. The program committee will not accept a full paper on the condition that it is cut down to fit in a short paper slot, nor will it invite short papers to be extended to full length. Submissions will be considered only in the category in which they are submitted.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Archival storage systems
Auditing and provenance
Caching, replication, and consistency
Cloud storage
Data-intensive applications
Database storage
Distributed I/O (wide-area, grid, peer-to-peer)
Empirical evaluation of storage systems
Experience with deployed systems
File-system design
Key-value and "nosql" storage
Mobile and personal storage
Parallel I/O
Power-aware storage architectures
Reliability, availability, and disaster tolerance
Search and data retrieval
Solid state storage technologies and uses (e.g., flash, PCM)
Storage for virtualized environments
Storage management
Storage networking
Storage performance and QoS
Storage security
The challenges of "big data"

Submission Instructions
Please submit paper titles and abstracts by 11:59 p.m. PDT on September 20, 2011, via the Web form, which will be available here soon. Full and short paper submisssions (no extended abstracts), must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. PDT on September 27, 2011, in PDF format via the Web form also. Do not email submissions.

The complete submission must be no longer than twelve (12) pages for full papers and six (6) for short papers, excluding references. The program committee will value conciseness, so if an idea can be expressed in fewer pages than the limit, please do so. Papers should be typeset in two-column format in 10 point Times Roman type on 12 point leading (single-spaced), with the text block being no more than 6.5" wide by 9" deep. References should not be set in a smaller font. Submissions that violate any of these restrictions will not be reviewed. The limits will be interpreted strictly. No extensions will be given for reformatting.

There are no formal restrictions on the use of color in graphs or charts, but please use them sparingly—not everybody has access to a color printer.
Authors must not be identified in the submissions, either explicitly or by implication. When it is necessary to cite your own work, cite it as if it were written by a third party. Do not say "reference removed for blind review."

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details.
If you are uncertain whether your submission meets USENIX's guidelines, please contact the program co-chairs, fast12chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered.
Blind reviewing of all papers will be done by the program committee, assisted by outside referees when necessary. Accepted papers will be shepherded through an editorial review process by a member of the program committee.

All papers will be available online to registered attendees, no earlier than January 24, 2012. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the main conference, February 15, 2012. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FAST '12 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present it. If the conference registration will pose a hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.

Best Paper Awards
Awards will be given for the best paper(s) at the conference. A small, selected set of papers will be forwarded for publication in ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) via a fast-path editorial process. Both full and short papers will be considered.

Test of Time Award
At FAST '12, we will begin a new tradition by awarding a paper from the conference ten years earlier with the "Test of Time" award, in recognition of its lasting impact on the field.

Work-in-Progress Reports and Poster Session
The FAST technical sessions will include a slot for short Work-in-Progress (WiP) reports presenting preliminary results and opinion statements. We are particularly interested in presentations of student work and ones that will provoke informative debate. While WiP proposals will be evaluated by the WiP chair for appropriateness, they are not peer reviewed in the same sense that papers are.

We will also hold poster sessions each evening. WiP submissions will automatically be considered for a poster slot, and authors of all accepted full papers will be asked to present a poster on their paper. Other poster submissions are very welcome.

Arrangements for submitting posters and WiPs will be announced later.

Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions
Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BoFs) are informal gatherings organized by attendees interested in a particular topic; they are held in the evenings. BoFs may be scheduled in advance by emailing the Conference Department at bofs@usenix.org. BoFs may also be scheduled at the conference.

Tutorial Sessions
Tutorial sessions will be held on February 14, 2012. Please send tutorial proposals to fasttutorials@usenix.org.