The High Performance Storage System (HPSS) provides scalable hierarchical storage management (HSM), archive, and file system services. Its design, implementation and current dominant use are focused on HSM and archive services. It is also a general-purpose, global, shared, parallel file system, potentially useful in other application domains. When HPSS design and implementation began over a decade ago, scientific computing power and storage capabilities at a site, such as a DOE national laboratory, was measured in a few 10s of gigaops, data archived in HSMs in a few 10s of terabytes at most, data throughput rates to an HSM in a few megabytes/s, and daily throughput with the HSM in a few gigabytes/day. At that time, the DOE national laboratories and IBM HPSS design team recognized that we were headed for a data storage explosion driven by computing power rising to teraops/petaops requiring data stored in HSMs to rise to petabytes and beyond, data transfer rates with the HSM to rise to ...
Richard W. Watson