USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST)
Conference positioning
USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) is a top computer-science conference venue for storage, file systems, memory/storage hierarchy, reliability, and data-intensive systems. It rewards a storage paper with realistic workloads, fault model, and performance/reliability tradeoff analysis. Treat this skill as a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool for conference submission strategy, not as a substitute for the current year's CFP, author kit, ethics policy, or submission portal.
Because CS conferences change deadlines, templates, page limits, review workflow, artifact rules, AI-use policy, and rebuttal formats every cycle, always verify the live official instructions before making a submission-ready recommendation. Start from the official source anchor recorded for this venue in ../../resources/conference-roster.md and ../../resources/official-source-map.md.
When to trigger
The author names FAST / USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies as the target venue.
A manuscript in storage needs a conference-fit read before being formatted or submitted.
The paper must be re-framed from journal style or arXiv style into a selective CS conference narrative.
The author needs an evidence-gap, anonymity, artifact, rebuttal, or re-routing diagnosis for this venue.
Best submissions make a precise contribution type visible: algorithm, theorem, system, dataset, benchmark, empirical finding, design artifact, tool, or socio-technical analysis.
The paper should explain why the result matters to FAST's reviewers, not just why it is interesting to the authors' lab or product context.
Position related work against the most recent conference-cycle papers in this venue and its closest siblings; stale comparisons are a common early-review weakness.
If the contribution is interdisciplinary, state which part is CS research and which part is domain evidence.
Venue-specific calibration
Reviewer lens: Treat FAST as a storage systems venue whose reviewers expect the scope and evidence to match its own community. Do not submit a generic CS paper until the introduction names the exact subcommunity, contribution type, and proof or empirical standard.
Contribution hook to foreground: the venue-specific contribution bar.
Scope vocabulary to use naturally in the abstract and introduction: storage, file systems, memory/storage hierarchy, reliability, and data-intensive systems.
Official anchor domain: www.usenix.org. Quote annual rules only after opening that source and the current-year CFP/author kit.
Close-neighbor routing guardrail
Use this profile only when the manuscript's central contribution is genuinely in storage
systems and the author can say why FAST reviewers are the primary audience, not merely a
convenient deadline.
Closest roster neighbors to compare before final routing: eurosys (EuroSys), usenix-annual- technical-conference (USENIX ATC), architectural-support-for-programming-languages-and- operating-systems (ASPLOS), international-symposium-on-computer-architecture (ISCA).
Break ties by contribution type, evidence shape, reviewer community, and the current
official CFP from www.usenix.org.
What distinguishes this venue from its closest siblings
What FAST is. The USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies — storage systems, file systems, and persistence.
Real neighbors. OSDI / NSDI / EuroSys / USENIX ATC (systems family) — not NLP or HCI venues.
Routing. Storage/file-system contributions here; networked systems to NSDI, OS to OSDI/SOSP.
FAST-specific routing detail
Prefer FAST when the contribution is about file systems, storage stacks, persistence, memory/storage hierarchy, reliability, durability, fault recovery, or storage workload behavior.
Route parallel programming abstractions to PPoPP, dialogue/NLP work to SIGDIAL/ACL-family venues, and broad OS or networked systems to OSDI/SOSP/NSDI.
FAST evidence should include realistic storage workloads, failure or crash-consistency model, durability/reliability tradeoffs, and comparison to mature storage baselines.
Method & evidence bar
Build the artifact or prototype far enough that the core design can be measured under realistic workloads.
Use appropriate baselines, sensitivity analyses, and workload characterization; systems reviewers look for hidden bottlenecks.
Separate engineering effort from research contribution: name the abstraction, mechanism, or tradeoff.
For FAST, the evidence must support the venue-specific signature: a storage paper with realistic workloads, fault model, and performance/reliability tradeoff analysis.
Include limitations, negative results, compute/resource reporting, data provenance, and ethics details when they affect the claim.
Structure & house style
Start from a systems pain point and show why existing abstractions fail.
Use evaluation sections that answer research questions, not a tour of every benchmark run.
Use the current official template exactly; do not guess page limits, font sizes, supplement rules, anonymity exceptions, or camera-ready requirements from old cycles.
The introduction should answer: problem, why now, what is new, why this venue, and what evidence proves the claim.
Put the strongest result in the main paper, not only in the appendix or supplement; reviewers should not have to reconstruct the contribution.
Re-check the current cycle's CFP, author kit, submission system, abstract/paper deadlines, page limits, supplementary-material rules, anonymity policy, dual-submission policy, ethics policy, AI-use policy, artifact/code/data expectations, rebuttal/author-response format, and camera-ready requirements.
Confirm the review workflow and portal: the current USENIX/ACM/IEEE author kit, artifact policy, and submission system.
Check whether accepted papers require in-person presentation, separate registration, artifact badges, proceedings copyright, or post-acceptance release forms.
If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win.
Pre-submission self-check
One sentence states why this manuscript belongs at FAST, using the venue's scope rather than generic "top conference" language.
The claim is calibrated to the evidence: no broader than the datasets, proofs, systems, user studies, deployments, or threat model support.
Related work includes the nearest current-cycle storage systems papers and explains the technical delta.
The paper satisfies the current official template, anonymity, ethics, artifact, and rebuttal requirements.
The main paper is self-contained enough for reviewers to evaluate novelty and correctness without hunting through external links.
Common desk-reject triggers
Toy implementation or microbenchmark-only evidence for a systems claim.
No comparison to mature systems or no explanation of deployment constraints.
Performance gains with unclear workload representativeness.
Formatting, anonymity, dual-submission, external-link, or supplement violations under the current-year policy.
A contribution framed for a neighboring field while giving FAST reviewers too little technical or empirical substance.
Re-routing decision
If the paper misses FAST's bar, compare against acm-symposium-on-operating-systems-principles / usenix-symposium-on-operating-systems-design-and-implementation / usenix-symposium-on-networked-systems-design-and-implementation / acm-sigcomm. Re-route based on contribution type, not prestige: theory to a theory venue, systems to a systems venue, application-heavy work to a domain venue, and early ideas to workshops or shorter tracks when the official CFP supports them.
Output format
[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST)
[Contribution type] algorithm / theory / system / dataset / benchmark / empirical / design / security / other
[Main evidence gap] <single most important missing proof, experiment, study, artifact, or policy check>
[Official items to re-check] CFP / author kit / deadline / format / anonymity / ethics / AI-use / artifact / rebuttal / camera-ready
[Top rejection risk] <venue-specific risk>
[Re-route suggestion] <better-matched conference or journal if not a fit>
