The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center currently uses a number of archival methods in order to provide rapid access to large files for both retrieval and placement in archival storage (into IBM ATL and STK silos). We run a Cray J90 as a file server; this is configured into ten user filesystems (which are both mirrored and striped for optimal performance). A Cray utility, Data Migration Facility (DMF) runs on these user filesystems and manages automatic tape migration.

Recently the J90 was configured as a DFS server and all user filesystems were exported through DCE/DFS, making them available to all DFS clients within the center. DMF continues to manage tape migration on these DFS exported files.

Currently we run DCE/DFS servers on Cray and IBM/AIX platforms, and DCE/DFS clients run on SGI, Sun and Cray C90 platforms. There is a (slowly) growing number of Windows NT machines within the PSC and within our research user community, and we are interested in looking at how (or whether) to integrate Windows NT into our environment.

We have, at present, two broad aims in investigating the use of Windows NT. First we would like to look at the performance and functionality of Windows NT as both DCE/DFS server and client. This would involve comparing filesystem performance with our current DCE/DFS servers (IBM/AIX primarily), and our other archive and filesystem methods. We will need to see how well Windows NT will scale within a high performance environment given our large data/archive requirements. We are also interested in performance as it relates to different network interfaces on any NT server or client.

Second, we are interested in looking at Web applications running on Windows NT, using DCE/DFS. At present, files accessed through our web servers reside on the Andrew FileSystem (AFS) currently, and we would like to move this to DCE/DFS to take advantage of functionality, performance, and security that is available through a mix of DCE/DFS and newer OS/hardware that AFS does not support.

The environment at the PSC is primarily Unix-based. While we are currently looking at using Windows NT within an HSM solution, there is also a general interest in other uses within our parallel and distributed applications, and workstation cluster groups.

V Dinamani
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Carnegie Mellon University
4400 Fifth Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

dinamani@psc.edu
https://www.psc.edu/~dinamani
412 268 1597