Petascale Data Storage Institute @ UC Santa Cruz

Storage devices such as disks and flash memory can fail and, in the quantities required by petascale computing, such failures are commonplace. UC Santa Cruz researchers are exploring ways to safeguard both data and metadata against storage device failure, both by keeping extra information to recover from failures, double-checking any changes made to the stored data, and proactively scanning storage devices for early signs of failure. Applying our techniques to non-volatile memory such as flash memory has improved system reliability by several orders of magnitude, guarding against both hardware and software errors and allowing flash memory to be used to safely store directory information for high-performance computing systems.

The Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) is part of the Petascale Data Storage Institute, a Department of Energy-funded institute exploring techniques to make high-performance storage faster and more usable.

PDSI Research at UC Santa Cruz

PDSI topics the SSRC is investigating include security for petascale storage, new approaches to distributed metadata, the use of storage class memories in high-performance systems, and archival storage.

PDSI Organization

The Petascale Data Storage Institute is led by Carnegie Mellon University. The PDSI institutions are:

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Sandia National Laboratory
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Michigan