| name | fast |
| description | Writing and formatting guidance for FAST (USENIX Conference on File Systems and Storage Technologies) papers. Use when drafting, formatting, or submitting to FAST 2026. Covers usenix-2020-09.sty / usenix2019_v3 style with \maketitles, double-blind review (anonymous submission), storage systems paper conventions (motivation, design, implementation, evaluation), 16-page limit, and camera-ready preparation. |
FAST 2026 Conference Writing Skill
CCF-A | Systems | Publisher: USENIX
Conference: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast26
Template: FAST/usenix-2020-09.sty (or usenix2019_v3.sty)
Document Setup
Preamble Structure
\documentclass[letterpaper,twocolumn,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{usenix-2020-09}
% OR: \usepackage{usenix2019_v3}
% Optional packages
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{cite}
\usepackage{hyperref}
Required Packages
\usepackage{usenix-2020-09} % or usenix2019_v3
\usepackage{cite} % order multiple entries in \cite{...}
\usepackage{url} % allow \url in bibtex for clickable links
\usepackage{xcolor} % color definitions
\usepackage[]{hyperref} % clickable refs within pdf
Page Limits
| Section | Limit |
|---|
| Main paper (submission) | 16 pages |
| References | No limit |
| Appendix | Permitted |
FAST enforces a 16-page limit for the main body. References and appendix do not count.
Anonymity Requirements
FAST uses double-blind review:
- No author names anywhere in the submission
- Use third person for self-citations: "Smith et al. showed..." not "we showed..."
- Anonymize all URLs (GitHub repos, institutional pages)
- Clear PDF metadata
- Do not include acknowledgments in submission
Camera-Ready Differences
After acceptance:
- Restore all author names and affiliations
- Verify figure quality and resolution
- Add acknowledgments if desired
- USENIX provides page numbers for camera-ready
Section Organization
FAST papers follow the systems paper structure:
- Introduction — Problem, motivation, contributions (enumerate contributions)
- Background & Motivation — Why the problem matters, prior approaches and their limits
- Design/Approach — Core technical contribution with rationale
- Implementation — System details, complexity, challenges solved
- Evaluation — Rigorous experimental methodology, baselines, sensitivity analysis
- Related Work — Thorough positioning against prior art
- Conclusion — Summary and future directions
- References
- Appendix (optional)
Storage Systems Conventions
FAST papers typically cover:
- File systems and storage architectures
- Storage performance and reliability
- Distributed storage systems
- Storage security and privacy
- New storage technologies (NVMe, persistent memory, etc.)
Performance Evaluation
\section{Evaluation}
We evaluate our file system using:
\begin{itemize}
\item \textbf{Benchmarks}: fio, IOzone, Filebench
\item \textbf{Workloads}: synthetic and real-world traces
\item \textbf{Metrics}: throughput (ops/sec), latency (usec), bandwidth (MB/s)
\end{itemize}
Figures and Tables
- Use vector formats (.pdf) for all diagrams
- Ensure grayscale legibility — reviewers often print in B&W
- Self-contained captions: describe what to observe and why it matters
- Tables should have clear column headers and units
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.85\linewidth]{figs/design-arch}
\caption{Architecture overview: (a) metadata server layout,
(b) data plane organization. Our design reduces metadata
lookup latency by 3x compared to the baseline.}
\label{fig:arch}
\end{figure}
References
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{references}
% Citations:
~\cite{smith2023} % [1]
Use plain bibstyle with numerical citations.
Formatting Rules
- Format: USENIX two-column, 10pt body
- Paper size: US Letter
- Margins: 0.75" sides, 1" top/bottom
- Text width: 7"
- Column gap: 0.33"
- Font: Times New Roman (mathptmx)
Submission Checklist
Camera-Ready Checklist
