Experiences From NASA/Langley's DMSS Project

There is a trend in institutions with high performance computing and data management requirements to explore mass storage systems with peripherals directly attached to a high speed network. The Distributed Mass Storage System (DMSS) Project at the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has placed such a system into production use. This paper will present the experiences, both good and bad, we have had with this system since putting it into production usage. The system is comprised of: 1) National Storage Laboratory (NSL)/UniTree 2.1, 2) IBM 9570 HIPPI attached disk arrays (both RAID 3 and RAID 5), 3) IBM RS6000 server, 4) HIPPI/IPI3 third party transfers between the disk array systems and the supercomputer clients, a CRAY Y-MP and a CRAY 2, 5) a "warm spare" file server, 6) transition software to convert from CRAY's Data Migration Facility (DMF) based system to DMSS, 7) an NSC PS32 HIPPI switch, and 8) a STK 4490 robotic library accessed from the IBM RS6000 block mux interface. This paper will cover: the performance of the DMSS in the following areas: file transfer rates, migration and recall, and file manipulation (listing, deleting, etc.); the appropriateness of a workstation class of file server for NSL/UniTree with LaRC's present storage requirements in mind the role of the third party transfers between the supercomputers and the DMSS disk array systems in DMSS; a detailed comparison (both in performance and functionality) between the DMF and DMSS systems LaRC's enhancements to the NSL/UniTree system administration environment the mechanism for DMSS to provide file server redundancy the statistics on the availability of DMSS the design and experiences with the locally developed transparent transition software which allowed us to make over 1.5 million DMF files available to NSL/UniTree with minimal system outage