Storage Systems

NERSC increased its mass storage capacity to 600 terabytes and upgraded the storage servers to IBM SP2s. The old storage systems, UniTree and CFS, were replaced with HPSS (High Performance Storage System).

Developed by a consortium of industrial, university, and government organizations--including NERSC's Jim Daveler--HPSS is a scalable parallel software system designed to move very large data objects between high performance computers, workstation clusters, and storage libraries at speeds many times faster than is possible with previous software systems.

The HPSS storage control system uses "data movers"--specialized software modules--to send large data streams, such as complex images and visualization objects, directly to the requesting computers without passing them through the HPSS storage server itself. HPSS takes itself out of the loop so that the only limiting factors are the maximum speed of the network and the devices themselves.

The HPSS conversion team included (from left) Majdi Baddourah, Jonathon Carter, Steve Lowe, Wayne Hurlbert, Harvard Holmes, Keith Fitzgerald, Jim Daveler, Tom DeBoni (front left), and project leader Nancy Meyer.