ViPEr HiSS Overview

Motivation

Data sizes for modern applications are in the hundreds of gigabytes and are rapidly approaching terabyte levels. Popular examples of such applications include multimedia-on-demand, digital libraries, data mining, and digital special effects. In addition, many of these applications have real time or continuity constraints. Even in those that do not, overall throughput is an important metric. Due to these trends, system performance has become critically dependent on the performance of its storage system.

Tertiary storage offers the potential of cheap storage media. One tradeoff is higher latency. Amortizing such latency in a storage hierarchy presents an intrinsic challenge; there are interdependencies between important design choices of a storage hierarchy.

Our work is directed at the design and optimization of resource management algorithms at all levels of the storage hierarchy, particularly with respect to multimedia applications.

Goals

The goal of this research tool is to provide a framework for performance evaluation of storage hierarchies. The focus of this research is storage and retrieval of data objects residing in secondary and tertiary layers of a storage hierarchy. Our tool is a work in progress involving cutting edge research concepts.

Our tool provides interfaces for easy construction and performance evaluation of hierarchical storage systems. Not only for simple reading and writing, our tool allows for the specification of data layouts across one or multiple storage devices.

Future objects will facilitate organization of multimedia (or any data) objects throughout the entire storage hierarchy, as well as determining which service guarantees are possible for retrieval of the data.

This project represents a fundamentally important step in a better understanding of hierarchical storage systems. It is this understanding that will lead to next generation systems that can support terabytes of data alongside with real time constraints of modern applications.

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This and related pages are copyright 1998, 1999 Joseph Dunnick
Joseph Dunnick

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