The High Performance Storage System

The National Storage Laboratory (NSL) was organized to develop, demonstrate and commercialize technology for the storage systems that will be the future repositories for the national information assets. Within the NSL four Department of Energy laboratories and IBM Federal Systems Company pooled their resources to develop an entirely new High Performance Storage System (HPSS). The HPSS project concentrates on scalable parallel storage systems for highly parallel computers as well as traditional supercomputers and workstation clusters. Concentrating on meeting the high end of storage system and data management requirements, HPSS is designed using network-connected storage devices to transfer data at rates of 100 million bytes per second and beyond. The resulting products will be portable to many vendor´s platforms. The three year project is targeted to be complete in 1995. This paper provides an overview of the requirements, design issues, and architecture of HPSS, as well as a description of the distributed, multi-organization industry and national laboratory HPSS project.