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>