Dear Colleague,

I am writing to invite you to attend the first USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '02). This is an exciting new conference that fills the need for a high-quality research forum in the areas of file systems and storage systems. It takes the place of I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems (IOPADS), and also provides a forum for research that might otherwise be scattered among many of the best operating system, distributed system, and computer architecture conferences. It is the conference to attend to get the best of the best in file systems and storage technology.

The FAST program, selected from the best of 110 submissions, represents some of the outstanding work in the area. The technical presentations will be given by top researchers from both academia and industry.

The program offers not one, but two keynote addresses: Dr. Robert Morris, the Director of the IBM Almaden Research Center, will speak on "Storage: From Atoms to People," and Prof. David Patterson of the University of California at Berkeley will speak on "Availability and Maintainability >> Performance: New Focus for a New Century." We have invited talks on the future of storage technology featuring Dr. Mark Kryder of Seagate Technology, Dr. Hans Coufal of IBM Research, and Dr. Jim Gray of Microsoft Research.

This promises to be an extremely exciting conference presenting the best of current research and a strong vision of the future. Please join us in beautiful Monterey, California, on January 28-30, 2002.