Performance Analysis of Tape

In this paper, we analyzed the performance of various robotically-accessed tape libraries for supercomputing workloads. We used an event-driven simulator to conduct the performance analysis, and we considered the workloads at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The simulation results showed that tape libraries with adequate performance parameters perform quite well on the supercomputing workloads, thus they are promising to be an important part of the mass storage systems used in the supercomputing environments. The results also showed that the tape drive forward search and rewind rate is the bottleneck in the tape libraries used under the supercomputing workloads. 1.1 INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, as the performance of processors is signiicantly increased, applications that involve huge amounts of data, e.g. computational science (2, 16, 17) and data mining (12, 13), became commonplace. It is not cost eeective to use the secondary storage devices as the only storage devices to cope with this much of data. Instead, tertiary storage devices (3, 11) should be used to store much of this data.