fast-writing-style

FAST Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. FAST papers are read by storage systems people, so they need

a storage contribution stated on the first page and an evaluation a storage reviewer trusts. The

failure this skill prevents is a technically fine paper that reads like a general systems demo or a

throughput-bar benchmark with "storage" in the title.

Revision rules

• Lead with the storage contribution: the storage problem a practitioner recognizes, the

storage cost current designs pay (write amplification, tail latency, endurance, space, or a

consistency gap), your design or finding, real-device evidence, and what changes for storage

systems.

• Frame the evaluation as a cost you change, not a speed you win. State up front which storage

quantity the paper moves; a reader should know by the end of the intro whether the headline is

bytes-written, p99 latency, drive lifetime, or recovery correctness.

• Pair every claim with proportional, real-device evidence — named drives and firmware, standard

workloads/traces, a distribution not just a mean, a device counter not an estimate — not

adjectives.

• Make the device reality visible early. A storage reviewer wants to know the hardware and its

state; a testbed table and a sentence on preconditioning/aging belong near the evaluation's start,

not buried.

• Protect the invariant. If the design defers, batches, or reorders writes, say early that you

verify crash consistency/durability still holds; do not let the reader wonder.

• Respect the USENIX page budget (FAST '27: ≤12 pages long / ≤6 short, references excluded) as a

design constraint. It is a firm two-column limit; recover space editorially, never by shrinking

the evaluation or the durability discussion.

• Maintain double-blind in self-citations (third person), system/tool names, acknowledgements,

funding, datacenter names, and trace-hosting URLs.

Storage paper skeleton

| Section | Job it must do | Common failure |

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

| Intro | Storage problem, the cost paid, contribution, evidence preview, storage payoff — first page | Leads with a technology trend, not a storage cost |

| Background | The device/media/workload reality the design exploits | Generic background not tied to the mechanism |

| Design / Study | The mechanism or the study protocol, reproducibly | Design described too thinly to rebuild |

| Evaluation | Each claim answered with the right storage metric on real devices | Throughput bar standing in for the claimed cost |

| Consistency/durability | The invariant the change risks, tested | Consistency asserted, never crash-tested |

| Related work | Delta-first positioning against storage literature | Citation catalog with no contrast |

Sentence-level rewrites

| Draft pattern | FAST-safe rewrite |

|---|---|

| "Our system is much faster." | "cuts write amplification from X to Y on <SSD model, firmware> at steady state" |

| "We evaluate on an SSD." | "on <model/capacity/firmware>, preconditioned to steady state, fill Z%, TRIM on" |

| "Low latency." | "p99.9 read latency of ... under <workload>; full distribution in Fig. N" |

| "It is reliable / consistent." | "recovers a consistent state at all <K> injected crash points (§6)" |

| "State-of-the-art throughput." | Claim scoped to the devices, workloads, and state actually tested |

| "We reduce writes by ~2x." | "bytes-written from device counters fell 2.1x (95% CI ...), vs. the tuned baseline" |

Storage-metric discipline

[Endurance]     report bytes-written / P/E cycles from device counters, not estimates
[Latency]       report the distribution (p50/p99/p99.9) under load, not the mean
[Amplification] separate read vs. write amplification; say how each is measured
[Space]         on-media footprint, including metadata/GC overhead
[Durability]    the crash-consistency invariant and the test that checks it
-> lead each result with the metric that matches the claim; put device+state beside it

Vignette: compressing a design-plus-study paper

A draft with a new cache design, six microbenchmarks, and a sprawling background: keep the design,

the two experiments that carry the headline (miss-ratio-vs-cost and tail latency on real traces),

and a crash-consistency check; move secondary microbenchmarks and full parameter sweeps to the

artifact with forward references; cut background to the media/workload facts the mechanism needs.

The test of a good cut: a reviewer should be able to answer "what storage cost does this change, by

how much, on what hardware, and does it stay correct?" from the body alone.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / under-motivated / wrong-metric / device-reality-missing / over-scoped
[First-page fix] <new framing leading with the storage cost the paper changes>
[Metric audit] <claim -> storage metric -> measured on real devices? yes/no>
[Durability check placement] <where the crash-consistency/invariant test is stated>
[Anonymity edits] <system names / self-citations / trace URLs / datacenter names to rewrite>