fast-supplementary

FAST Supplementary

Use this when assembling FAST supplementary material. The governing rule is simple and strict: **the

paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone.** The artifact, traces, and any appendix

support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers open the artifact at their discretion, so

anything the decision depends on lives in the body.

What goes where

| Content | Body (within page budget) | Artifact / appendix |

|---|---|---|

| The storage claim and its headline result | Yes | — |

| Core design or study protocol | Yes | Full parameter sweeps, extra configs |

| The testbed: device models, firmware, state | Yes (summary table) | The complete machine/firmware inventory |

| Headline storage metrics + the invariant test | Yes (WA/tail latency/crash test) | Full distributions, per-run logs |

| Crash-consistency evidence for a durability claim | The result + method | The fault-injection / replay harness |

| Workloads and traces | Named + why chosen | The trace archive and replay scripts |

| Raw device counters, logs, scripts | — | Yes |

| Reproduction instructions | A pointer | The README and run scripts |

If a reviewer would need to open the artifact to know whether to accept, the paper is

mis-partitioned — move that evidence into the body.

The page-budget discipline

FAST's USENIX two-column budget (FAST '27: ≤12 pages long / ≤6 short, references excluded) is

firm, and it counts figures and tables. References are uncapped, so a rich bibliography costs no body

space, but everything else competes. Consequences:

• Keep the headline storage metric, the device table, and the durability/consistency check in the

body — they are decision-critical.

• Move long parameter sweeps, per-device breakdowns, and secondary microbenchmarks to the artifact

with explicit forward references.

• Do not use the artifact to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes

with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.

Double-blind supplementary rules

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, funders, hostnames, cluster paths, or
                repo owners anywhere in the archive or appendix
[Anonymized links] the availability link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal/institutional repo
[Scrub device dumps] SMART/firmware/config dumps can carry serials, hostnames, or datacenter tags — redact them
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or huge irrelevant trace dumps
[Opens clean]    verify the archive unzips and the README orients a reader in one minute on a fresh machine

Appendix and artifact-appendix architecture

• Order supplementary sections to mirror the paper's claim/RQ order; reviewers navigate by claim, not

page number.

• Keep each supplementary section referenced from the body at least once — orphaned material is

invisible under discretionary review.

• Distinguish the review-time artifact (anonymized, for the paper's reviewers) from the **artifact

appendix** added post-acceptance for the AEC and badges (fast-artifact-evaluation); do not

conflate them.

• Confirm on the current call whether any in-paper appendix counts against the page budget; this

varies and changes the split.

Vignette: splitting a file-system design paper

A paper presenting a new file-system layout plus an evaluation: the body keeps the design, the

headline results (write amplification and tail latency on named devices at steady state), the

crash-consistency test summary, and the caveats; the artifact holds the full parameter sweeps, the

complete device/firmware inventory, the aging-workload scripts, the crash-injection harness, the

archived traces with replay scripts, and the analysis notebooks. Nothing decision-critical lives only

in the artifact, because artifact inspection is discretionary and the reviewers judge from the pages.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within the 12/6-page limit? references excluded correctly? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive + device dumps clean of identity/metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the artifact>