Dear Colleague,

We are writing to invite you to attend the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '08), February 26–29, in San Jose, California.

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 '08 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 26, the four half-day tutorials give you the opportunity to learn from leaders in the storage industry including:

• Brent Welch and Marc Unangst on Clustered and Parallel Storage System Technologies
• Richard Freitas, Winfried Wilcke, and Bulent Kurdi on Storage Class Memory, Technology, and Use
• Rob Ross and Rob Latham on Parallel I/O for High-Performance Computing
• Christian Cachin on Cryptographic Methods for Protecting Storage Systems

The FAST '08 program includes 21 technical papers, as well as 2 keynote addresses, Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs), and a poster session.

The papers represent some of the outstanding work in the area, with topics including archival storage, storage system failure analyses, performance, and provisioning.

Keynote addresses kick off the first two days of the technical sessions:

• "'It's like a fire. You just have to move on': Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving," by Cathy Marshall, Senior Researcher, Microsoft
• "Sustainable IT Ecosystem," by Chandrakant Patel, HP Fellow, Hewlett-Packard Labs

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 an abstract or proposal (one page or less, in plain text or PDF) to fast08wips@usenix.org by midnight PST, Thursday, January 17, 2008.

New in '08, 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. Poster submissions should include a brief description of the research, not to exceed two pages in plain text or PDF. Posters may be accompanied by demos; if a demo is planned, the proposal should briefly (1–2 paragraphs) describe its nature. Send poster proposals to fast08posters@usenix.org by midnight PST, Thursday, January 17, 2008.

FAST '08 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 Jose. Please register today.

On behalf of the FAST '08 Program Committee,