Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association.
The 24th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '26) will take place on February 24–26, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara in Santa Clara, CA, USA.
New for FAST '26: There will be two submission deadlines, and we introduce one-shot revisions. See below for more details about our updated submission process.
Important Dates
Spring deadline:
- Paper submissions due: Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 23:59 AoE
- Author response period begins: Tuesday, May 20, 2025
- Author response period ends: Thursday, May 22, 2025, 23:59 AoE
- Notification to authors: Thursday, June 5, 2025
- Final paper files due: Tuesday, July 29, 2025, 23:59 AoE
Fall deadline:
- Paper submissions due: Tuesday, September 16, 2025, 23:59 AoE
- Author response period begins: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
- Author response period ends: Thursday, November 20, 2025, 23:59 AoE
- Notification to authors: Monday, December 8, 2025
- Final paper files due: Tuesday, January 27, 2026, 23:59 AoE
Overview
The 24th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '26) brings together researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of systems related to storage. The program committee interprets storage-related systems broadly: submissions on low-level storage devices, distributed storage systems, information and data management, as well as other systems interconnected with storage are all of interest. The conference will consist of technical presentations including refereed papers and poster sessions.
Topics
The topics of interest to FAST are various aspects of systems related to storage. These include and overlap with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Archival systems
- AI for storage and storage for AI
- Auditing and provenance
- Big data, analytics, and data sciences
- Caching, replication, and consistency
- Cloud, multi- and hybrid-cloud environments
- Data deduplication and compression
- Database storage
- Distributed and networked storage (wide-area, grid, peer-to-peer)
- Emerging memory hierarchy design
- Empirical evaluation
- Experience with deployed-systems
- File system design
- Hardware design and prototypes
- HPC systems, including parallel I/O
- Key-value and NoSQL storage
- Memory-only storage systems
- Mobile, personal, embedded, and home storage
- Networking
- Novel and emerging storage technologies (e.g., DNA and glass storage)
- Performance and QoS
- Power-aware storage architectures
- RAID and erasure coding
- Reliability, availability, and disaster tolerance
- Search and data retrieval
- Security
- Storage Management
Submission Instructions
Two Deadlines
New for FAST '26, we are offering authors the option to submit to one of two submission deadlines. Our intention is to align with other major conferences in our field and encourage authors to submit their work when it is ready, rather than potentially holding it for half a year for a single FAST deadline. Papers accepted during either deadline will be presented at the conference and will be published in the proceedings. Pre-publication PDFs will be available after the Spring review cycle.
Please submit your short and long papers by one of the submission deadlines listed above, in PDF format via the submission form. Do not email submissions. There is no separate deadline for abstract submissions.
- The complete submission must be no longer than 12 pages for long papers and no longer than 6 pages for short papers, excluding references. The program committee values conciseness: if you can express an idea in fewer pages than the limit, do so.
- Supplemental material is optional and may be added (if deemed really necessary) as a single separate PDF file without page limits. However, the reviewers are not required to read or consider such material. All content that should be considered to judge the paper is not supplemental and should be part of the main submitted file.
- Papers must be typeset on U.S. letter-sized pages in two columns using 10-point Times Roman font on 12-point leading (single-spaced), within a text block 7" wide by 9" deep.
- Labels, captions, and other text in figures, graphs, and tables must use font sizes that, when printed, do not require magnification to be legible. References must not be set in a smaller font. Submissions that violate these requirements will not be reviewed. Limits will be enforced strictly. No extensions will be given for reformatting.
- A LaTeX template and style file are available on the USENIX templates page.
- Double-blind policy: Authors must not be identified in the submissions, either explicitly or by implication. To refer to your previous work, consider it as written by a third party. Do not say "reference removed for blind review." Supplemental material must be anonymized. Submissions violating anonymization rules will not be considered for review. If you are uncertain about how to anonymize your submission, please contact the program co-chairs, fast26chairs@usenix.org, well in advance of the submission deadline.
- Prior Workshop Paper Policy: If a submission extends a prior workshop paper, please include an anonymized copy of the workshop paper as supplemental material. This should be the same as the published version, with any identifying information removed.
- 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, contact the program co-chairs, fast26chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.
- Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered.
- Submissions should abide by the Conflict Identification guidelines (see below).
The program committee and external reviewers will judge papers on technical merit, significance, relevance, and presentation. Research papers on new and unexplored problems are encouraged. A good research paper:
- addresses a significant problem;
- presents an interesting, compelling solution;
- demonstrates the benefits and drawbacks of the solution;
- draws appropriate conclusions using sound experimental methods;
- clearly describes what the authors have done; and
- clearly articulates the advances beyond previous work.
Program committee members, USENIX, and the broader community generally value a paper more highly if it is accompanied by artifacts not previously available. These artifacts may include traces, original data, source code, or tools developed as part of the submitted work.
Blind reviewing of all papers will be done by the program committee, assisted by outside referees when necessary. Accepted papers will be shepherded by a member of the program committee.
Short Papers
In addition to long papers (up to 12 pages), FAST also solicits short papers (up to 6 pages long). Just like long papers, short papers should describe completed research where the problem statement, proposed solution, and evaluation are all logically complete and conclusions are drawn. While short papers are held to the same high standards as long papers, they tend to comprise smaller contributions that require a shorter description and less analysis than in long papers.
We emphasize that papers that describe early-stage research that is not yet fully evaluated are not suitable for this short-paper category. That is, preliminary or work-in-progress papers generally considered in workshops such as HotStorage do not fall within the scope of short papers.
For short papers, the title should be prefixed with "Short Paper: ", followed by the title. The prefix will not be published in the proceedings and short papers will not be called out as such in the program. Authors must also indicate that they are submitting a short paper by checking the appropriate checkbox on the submission form. The program committee will not accept a paper on the condition of adjusting its length beyond typical shepherding guidelines. Submissions will be considered only in the category in which they are submitted.
To see examples of qualified short papers, we encourage authors to browse short papers accepted at prior FAST conferences—from 2012 to 2025.
Deployed-Systems Papers
FAST also solicits papers that describe real operational systems, including systems currently in production. Deployed-systems papers should address experience with the practical design, implementation, analysis, deployment, or operation of such systems. We encourage the submission of papers that disprove or strengthen existing assumptions, deepen the understanding of existing problems, and validate known techniques in environments in which they were never before used or tested, with preference given to experimental results based on production data. Deployed-systems papers will be treated similarly to other papers for publication purposes; they need not present new ideas or results to be accepted but should offer useful guidance to practitioners.
A good deployed-systems paper:
- clearly articulates lessons learned from deploying in production;
- describes an operational system of broad interest;
- discusses practical problems encountered in production; and
- supports the lessons with appropriate evidence, potentially including statistical data from the actual deployment, empirical evaluation of the system (on production platforms rather than small testbeds), and anecdotes.
For deployed-systems papers, the title should be prefixed with "Deployed System: ", followed by the title. The prefix will not be published in the proceedings. Authors must also indicate that they are submitting a deployed-systems paper by checking the appropriate checkbox on the submission form. If a paper is both short and falls in the deployed-systems category, both prefixes should be used (in any order), and both checkboxes selected.
Double-blind policy for deployed-systems papers: All submissions for FAST '26 are required to follow the double-blind policy (see above). However, with deployed-systems papers, the product or company described in the paper need not be anonymized (unlike author names).
Author Response Period
FAST '26 will allow authors to respond to reviews prior to final decision, according to the schedule above. Authors must limit their response to correcting factual errors in the reviews, to addressing questions posed by reviewers, and to clarifying the ideas in the paper. Responses may include new experiments and data in response to a reviewer's request. Responses are optional and limited to 1000 words. FAST will be enforcing a hard limit on the length of the author's response for fairness and to reduce workload (for both authors and reviewers): exceeding the word limit will impact a paper negatively.
Conflict Identification
Upon submitting your paper, authors must indicate conflicts with PC members. A conflict exists in one of the following cases:
Institution: You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the past two years, or are going to begin employment at the same institution. A completed internship does not constitute an institutional conflict.
Advisor/Advisee: Doctoral thesis advisor and post-doctoral advisor (if relevant) are conflicts for life.
Collaboration: You have a collaboration on a project, publication, grant proposal, or editorship within the past two years.
Close friends and family: Close family relations (e.g., spouse, parent/child, sibling) and close friends are conflicts forever if they are potential reviewers.
The PC will review paper conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts if necessary. If there is no basis for conflicts indicated by authors, such conflicts will be removed. Do not identify PC members as a conflict solely to avoid having them as reviewers. If you have any questions about conflicts, contact the program co-chairs.
Author Notification and Beyond
Notification. Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or rejection according to the schedule above. For the first time at FAST '26, a few papers that cannot be accepted immediately but which are likely to be accepted with a revision will be given the opportunity to submit a one-shot revision (see below).
We expect that one author of each accepted paper will physically attend the conference and present the work in a dedicated time slot (unless all authors are unable to travel to the U.S. due to visa issues, country-based travel restrictions, or health or medical reasons).
If your paper is accepted and you need an invitation letter to apply for a visa to attend the conference, contact conference@usenix.org as soon as possible. Visa applications are reportedly taking more than two months to process. Please identify yourself as a presenter or an author, and include your mailing address in your email request.
If the conference registration fee will pose a hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.
Early Rejection Notification. We will notify authors of papers that are rejected early in the process, prior to the author response period. The goal is to allow authors of early rejected papers to use reviewer feedback earlier and resubmit to another conference as soon as possible. Early rejected papers will no longer be considered under submission (regarding multiple submission policies) upon receipt of a rejection notification.
Paper Availability: All accepted papers will be listed on our website and made available online to registered attendees before the conference at a date that depends on the review cycle. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org by the final camera-ready paper deadline for your review cycle. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the conference, Tuesday, February 24, 2026. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FAST '26 website; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.
One-Shot Revision: A one-shot revision decision includes a summary of the paper's merits and a list of necessary changes that are required for the paper to be accepted at FAST. Authors given a one-shot-revision decision will be sent, within a few days of the decision, detailed instructions about how to resubmit. Authors may then submit a version of their work addressing all revision instructions during the subsequent deadline. Papers revised and resubmitted following a one-shot-revision decision can only receive a decision of accept or reject after revision, not revise; this is what makes revisions "one-shot."
Unlike papers accepted with shepherding, the revision instructions may include running additional experiments that obtain specific results, e.g., comparing performance against a certain alternative.
During the revision period, the paper is still considered under review at FAST and, therefore, cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration (as per the USENIX Submission Policy, which precludes concurrent submission to other conferences).
If authors receive a one-shot-revision decision for a paper submitted to the fall deadline of FAST '26, this gives them the option to make the requested changes and resubmit it to the next FAST deadline, which is the first deadline of FAST '27. If the paper is accepted then, it will appear at FAST '27, not FAST '26.
Policy on FAST Resubmissions
As described above, the FAST '26 conference offers two submission deadlines: spring and fall. Papers rejected at the spring deadline cannot be resubmitted at the FAST '26 fall deadline. However, both papers rejected at the spring and fall deadlines may be resubmitted at either deadline for FAST '27.