High Throughput Tertiary Storage in HPC Environments

Abstract

Magnetic tape in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments has traditionally been used as a tertiary layer in a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system. We propose that tape be given a more central role in the HPC data centre with direct involvement of the batch scheduler. To this end, we have begun development of a purpose-built tape storage system called Tapr. The write strategy used by Tapr allows the system to provide precise estimates on transfer time of data from tertiary storage to primary fast parallel storage.