San Francisco, Calif. — March 23, 2004 — USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association today announced that Garth Gibson will provide the keynote address for the third USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’04) taking place March 31- April 2, 2004 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. Gibson is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Panasas, the leader in object-based storage systems for scalable Linux clusters. FAST ’04 will bring together storage system researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation and deployment of storage systems. Registration information can be found at http://www.usenix.org/fast04

“Dr. Gibson’s significant contributions to storage and file system research make him an industry icon,” said USENIX Board President, Marshall Kirk McKusick. “FAST is the top forum for presenting the latest breakthroughs in storage research and innovative views for the future, and Gibson is the ideal person to keynote our program.”

Gibson's ground-breaking work on RAID, first published in 1988, now provides the organizing principles for all enterprise storage products. An associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Gibson is the founder of the university’s Parallel Data Lab, which has done extensive research on disk array architectures, parallel and prefetching file systems, storage networking and storage security. He is also a member of the technical council of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and an IEEE information storage award winner. Gibson’s keynote address, "Scaling File Service Up and Out” will take place on Thursday, April 2nd at 9:00 a.m.

“USENIX consistently brings together the industry’s top engineers, scientists and researchers to discuss the rapid changes in technology,” said Gibson. “I am honored to participate in the premier conference devoted to file and storage technology research to discuss the evolving world of network storage, distributed file systems and the emerging role of object storage.”

Sponsored by the USENIX Association, and in cooperation with ACM SIGOPS, IEEE Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee (MSSTC) and IEEE TCOS, FAST ’04 offers18 refereed papers on topics ranging from fault-tolerance and storage management to mobile storage. The technical presentation delivered by top researchers from both academia and industry include cover areas of reliability and availability; policy and configuration; file systems; optimizing block access; caching and scheduling; mobile storage, and tracing and measurement.

About the USENIX Association

USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For over 25 years, it has been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more information about USENIX, visit http://www.usenix.org

About Panasas

Formed in 2000, Panasas, Inc. (www.panasas.com) is the pioneering leader in object-based storage clustering for scalable Linux clusters. Panasas offers a networked storage solution that eliminates the inherent scalability bottlenecks in capacity and performance experienced by traditional networked storage systems. The system, based on industry standards, is designed to easily and cost-effectively integrate into existing IT environments. The company's headquarters are in Fremont, CA with development facilities in Pittsburgh, PA and Houston, TX.