Introduction to the Special Section on USENIX ATC 2022

The USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) publishes current computer systems research across system disciplines including networking, storage, security, operating systems, databases, and machine learning. This special section of the ACM Transactions on Storage presents some highlights from the storage-related papers published in the USENIX ATC in 2022. A large proportion of ATC papers have traditionally been related to storage. ATC ’22 has continued this trend. Out of 393 submissions, the authors tagged 124 (32%) with one or more topic labels related to Storage, File Systems, Key-Value Stores, and Data Management Systems. The conference accepted 14 storage-related works (22% of all published submissions). We selected three storage papers. They have been expanded since their publication and rereviewed by several of their original ATC ’22 reviewers. Collectively, they represent the mission of the USENIX organization: to bring together researchers from academia and systems practitioners working on production systems and/or large installations of cloud services providers. The ATC complements other USENIX venues including the premier research conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) as well as storageand networked-systems-focused conferences of File and Storage Technologies (FAST) and Networked Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX NSDI), respectively. We are pleased to present these papers representing this cross section in their expanded form. The Realizing Strong Determinism Contract on Log-Structured Merge Key-Value Stores paper advocates for a hardware and software co-designed framework that advances the state-of-the-art of a widely used persistent data structure of log-structured merge trees for NVMe SSDs. The ZNSwap: un-Block your Swap paper presents a new approach for Zoned Namespace SSDs that significantly improves the performance of Linux memory swap on SSD devices. Finally, the CacheSack: Theory and Experience of Google’s Admission Optimization for Datacenter Flash Caches paper, submitted to the ATC Operational Systems Track, describes the design of using Flash caches to lower I/O access latency, drawing on years of research and experiences of the authors. We hope that you will find new insights into the complex world of storage by reading them.