Dear Colleague,

I am writing to invite you to attend the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '03), March 31 through April 2, 2003, in beautiful San Francisco, California.

FAST '03 builds on the success of the first FAST conference last winter, initiated by Darrell Long and other prominent storage system researchers from academia and industry.

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 '03 will bring together over 250 storage specialists from all of these areas in a unified, high-quality forum.

The FAST '03 program includes 18 technical papers carefully selected from a pool of 67 submissions by a program committee of 16 leading researchers. These papers represent some of the outstanding work in the area, ranging from RAID design to secure wide-area file sharing. The technical presentations will be given by top researchers from both academia and industry.

The program features a keynote address by Dr. John Wilkes of Hewlett-Packard Labs, an HP Fellow and ACM Fellow with 15 years of research leadership in self-managing large-scale storage. Technical presentations will be given by top researchers from both academia and industry, including Dave Belanger, Chief Scientist, AT&T Research; EMC's David Black, IETF chair for Internet Storage; CMU's Garth Gibson, founder and CTO of Panasas; Steve Kleiman, CTO of Network Appliance; Reagan Moore, Associate Director of Data-Intensive Computing at the San Diego Supercomputer Center; and Tom Ruwart of I/O Performance, Inc.

FAST '03 promises to be an exciting conference presenting the best of current research and a strong vision of the future. Please join us in San Francisco.

Jeffrey S. Chase, Duke University
FAST '03 Program Chair