Towards a Scalable Metacomputing Storage Service

We describe a prototypical storage service through which we are addressing some of the open storage issues in wide-area distributed high-performance computing. We discuss some of the relevant topics such as latency-tolerance, hierarchical storage integration, and legacy and commercial application support. Existing high-performance computing environments are either ad-hoc or focus narrowly on the simple clientserver case. The storage service which we are developing as part of the DISCWorld metacomputing infrastructure will provide high-performance access to a global “cloud” of storage resources in a manner which is scalable, secure, adaptive and portable, requiring no application or operating system modifications. Our system design provides flexible, modular and user-extensible access to arbitrary storage mechanisms and on-demand data generation and transformations. We describe our current prototype’s status, some performance analysis, other related research and our future plans...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: HPCN
• Authors: Craig J. Patten, Kenneth A. Hawick, J. F. Hercus
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Hierarchical Storage Integration, HPCN 1999, Prototypical Storage Service, Storage Service