DHPC Adelaide

DHPC Technical Report DHPC-058

Towards a Scalable Metacomputing Storage Service

Craig J. Patten, K.A. Hawick and J.F. Hercus

Archived: 1 December 1998

Published in Proc. of High Performance Computing and Networks (HPCN) Europe '99, Amsterdam, April 1999.

Abstract

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 these issues, such as latency-tolerance, heterogeneity, adaptive communications and storage utilisation, tertiary storage integration, and support for legacy and commercial applications. Existing systems addressing these issues in high-performance computing environments are either ad-hoc or focus narrowly on the simple client-server 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 is such that it 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, other related research and our future plans for the system.

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