Fast Experiments

FAST Experiments

Use this before submission when the storage evaluation is not yet locked. FAST reviewers are storage people; the evaluation is where a good idea is won or lost, and the questions are storage-specific. The organizing principle is measure the storage cost you claim to change, on real hardware in a realistic state — not a throughput bar on a fresh drive.

Evaluation audit

• Match the metric to the storage claim. A claim about endurance needs bytes-written / P/E cycles, not throughput; a claim about responsiveness needs tail latency (p99/p99.9), not the mean; a claim about space needs measured on-media footprint; a claim about durability needs a crash-consistency test. The wrong metric is the most common FAST reject.
• Use real devices, and name them. Model, capacity, interface (SATA/SAS/NVMe), and — critically — firmware version, plus host, kernel, and filesystem/mkfs options. Nominally identical drives differ part-to-part and across firmware; a result without the device table is not auditable.
• Control device state. SSDs must be preconditioned to steady state (fresh-out-of-box numbers flatter every design); report fill level and TRIM/discard state. For file systems, report whether the volume was aged/fragmented or empty — aging can dominate the result.
• Drive with credible workloads and traces. Standard generators (fio, filebench, YCSB for KV/DB) and archived traces (SNIA IOTTA block/object traces, production-derived traces) beat an ad-hoc microbenchmark. Ship the job files and replay scripts.
• Choose fair baselines, including the strongest prior system and a reasonable default, tuned with a documented, equal budget. An untuned or default-config baseline is a scored weakness.
• Test the invariant your optimization risks. If a change defers writes, batches, or reorders, show crash consistency still holds (record-and-replay / fault injection), not just that it is faster.
• Design threats in, not on: know before you run which confounds (device variance, thermal throttling, cache effects, contamination of a trace) will bite, and instrument to bound them.

Claim-to-evidence design table

Device-state and measurement floor

[Devices]      list model, capacity, interface, firmware; host, kernel, mkfs/mount options
[Steady state] precondition SSDs to steady state; state fill level and TRIM; disclose FOB vs. aged
[Warmup]       discard cold-cache warmup unless the cold path IS the claim; state cache/DRAM sizes
[Repeats]      multiple runs; report variance/CIs; note thermal or throttling effects
[Counters]     read WA, bytes-written, GC activity from device logs where available, not estimates
[Trace replay] replay archived traces with a documented tool; state timing fidelity (open vs. closed loop)

Crash-consistency and durability testing

Durability claims are load-bearing at FAST and are frequently under-tested:

[Model]     state the failure model (power loss, kernel panic, fsync semantics)
[Injection] use block-level record-and-replay or a fault injector to cut writes at many points
[Check]     verify the post-recovery state satisfies the invariant (no torn/lost committed data)
[Coverage]  report how many crash points / orderings were tested, not a single anecdote

Provenance floor for traces and field studies

• Archive the replayed trace (or document access) and the replay scripts; a trace named but not shipped cannot be reproduced.
• For field/reliability studies, state the population, drive models, technology (SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC), duration, and how failures/replacements were defined and counted.
• Report how outliers, warmup, and defective units were handled — silent inclusion or exclusion skews every downstream number.

Vignette: evaluating a compaction change for a KV store

Suppose the paper claims an endurance-aware compaction scheduler cuts bytes written. The matching plan: run on named SSDs at steady state with firmware recorded; drive with YCSB plus an archived production trace; measure bytes-written from the device's own counters, not the LSM's estimate; report read-latency distributions incl. p99.9 to prove the trade is bounded; compare against the tuned stock compactor with an equal budget; and run a crash-consistency record-and-replay test to confirm deferring compactions did not weaken durability — every number traceable to a logged run in the artifact.

Output format

[Evaluation readiness] strong / adequate / weak
[Claim -> metric map] <claim: device/metric/statistic>
[Device reality] <models + firmware + state (steady/aged/fill/TRIM) stated? yes/no>
[Baseline fairness] <baseline -> tuned? equal budget? same hardware/state?>
[Durability check] <crash-consistency / fault-injection test present? yes/no>
[Threats-by-design] <device variance / warmup / trace contamination -> instrumentation>
[Decision-critical next run] <one experiment to add>