SCC held an International User Forum for the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) from September 9 to 12. There were 60 participants from 26 HPSS facilities. Of these, 30 were from Europe, 24 from America and Canada and 6 from Asia. The User Forum is an exchange of all facilities that use HPSS.
The HPSS storage software fulfills the most demanding requirements for long-term scalable storage requirements. Magnetic tape is the most economical storage solution for infrequently accessed data and is often referred to as "zero-watt storage". However, read access to tape data can also be scaled efficiently with the right installation. There is no one way to set up an HPSS, and each facility adapts it very precisely to its own needs. Typically, an HPSS is used by facilities that want to store large amounts of data over a long period of time. Many of these institutions deal with weather or climate research data, which is usually kept for a long time. The SCC certainly does not operate the largest installation, but it is one of the most active and innovative facilities that gets the maximum out of the hardware and achieves very good throughput rates. The German Tier 1 center for the Large Hadron Collider GridKa operated at SCC and the bwDataArchive service use an HPSS as tape storage technology. A disaster recovery installation for the Large Scale Data Facility to store large volumes of scientific data is also being set up.
During the user forum, both the developers reported on the next innovations and the use of their installations and the associated peculiarities. There were also reports on how and with which tools the systems are monitored. Efficient system monitoring is essential, as bottlenecks or problems need to be identified quickly in order to be able to react accordingly.
The HPSS community describes itself as a "big friendly family" in which a good exchange is maintained and people help each other.
During the four days:
- shared operational experiences and the various HPSS upgrades and lessons learned
- Techniques for managing workload performance were presented in order to organize data on tape and optimize tape drive access.
- HPSS monitoring tools and scenarios of how end-user interfaces utilize HPSS were presented
- Diagnostic and troubleshooting guides for tape drives explained
- told "horror stories" from sites and how they overcame them
- and last but not least, reports on new projects that the sites are working on.
In addition to the many technical presentations and lively discussions, there was a GridKa tour and a social get-together with a delicious tarte flambée meal at the SCC. The Schlosslichtspiele Karlsruhe were a highlight of the social program and the excellent conference dinner was accompanied by a museum tour about AI at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM).