Coordinating Simultaneous Caching of File Bundles from Tertiary Storage

In a previous paper [Shoshani et al 99], we described a system called STACS (Storage Access Coordination System) for High Energy and Physics (HEP) experiments. These experiments generate very large volumes of “event” data at a very high rate. The volumes of data may reach 100's of terabytes/year and therefore they are stored on robotic tape systems that are managed by a mass storage system. The data are stored as files on tapes according to a predetermined order, usually according to the order they are generated. A major bottleneck is the retrieval of subsets of these large datasets during the analysis phase. STACS is designed to optimize the use of a disk cache, and thus minimize the number of files read from tape. In this paper, we describe an interesting problem of disk staging coordination that goes beyond the one-file-at-a-time requirement. The problem stems from the need to coordinate the simultaneous caching of groups of files that we refer to as "bundles of files...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SSDBM
• Authors: Arie Shoshani, Alex Sim, Luis M. Bernardo, Henrik Nordberg
• Keywords: Analysis Applications, Database, Disk Cache, SSDBM 2000, Storage Access Coordination