Special Interest Committee (SIC) report

Mass Storage Systems

by Helene E. Kulsrud

Interest in Mass Storage Systems continues high. The MSS Special Interest Committee sponsored a tutorial and 12 talks at the Fall 1996 CUG in Charlotte, North Carolina. These were:

• Tutorial on "Data Migration Facility (DMF) and the Advanced Tape MSP"--Paul Ernst, Cray Research

• Reports from Cray Research:
  • "Current Status and Future Plans for DMF"--Tom Lanzatella

  • "XFS, the Future File System from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)"--Brian Gaffey

  • "Scalable I/O Development"--Susan Crawford

  These talks explained plans as to how Silicon Graphics and Cray Research would merge their MSS activities.

• Archiving (start of a series of talks from vendors about network archiving systems):
  • "HYPERtape Architecture"--Dick Immerfall, MultiStream Systems, Inc.

  • "Using the HYPERtape system at Kiel University"--Owe Olias, UNIKIEL

• User systems:
  • "The High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) Project at LLNL" (one of the largest)--Dick Watson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • "How to Save Your System at a Low Cost"--Gary Smith, University of Texas

  • "Mass Storage Progress at Pittsburgh"--Phil Andrews, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

  • "Using ESCON and Redwood Tapes in the NCAR System"--John Merrill, National Center for Atmospheric Research

  • "Using Redwood Tapes"--Hartmut Fichtel, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ)

  • "The Current Status of the Cray Research Shared File System"--Paul Anderson, Department of Defense

• Standards:
  • "An Update on the Progress of MSS IEEE Standards"--Jack Cole, Army Research Laboratory

You can access the CUG MSS SIC page through the CUG home page (http://www.cug.org). We hope to link in some interesting results presented at the CUG meeting. Please send any MSS reports or short blurbs about product successes or failures to the CUG MSS webmaster, Jack Cole (cole@arl.mil).

CUG is a good place to present your MSS papers. Our sessions are always well attended! Topics of interest include archiving, data management systems, data mining in large datasets, use of tape and disk, experience with Cray Research mass storage products, and special features of MSS at your site.

Rob Silvia of the North Carolina Supercomputing Center (rjs@ncsc.org) has been elected the new chair of the MSS SIC.

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Comments to: lester@ucar.edu