CERN Accelerating science

Abstract

Plans for HPSS stoppage and upgrade.

For several months our production HPSS version has been technically unsupported. We have verified the new version in our test cell and need a stoppage of several days to migrate the production cell. This involves changing the Operating System from AIX 4.2 to 4.3, the DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) from 2.1 to 2.2, then HPSS from 4.1 to 4.1.1.4.

Such a major change must be done when sufficient staff are guaranteed to be available so we are planning to take the week of 8 January 2001 when CERN re-opens. We are reserving the whole of that week but hope that only the first two or three days will be needed. We will inform users of progress as we go along. This should be the only visible major system change to HPSS during 2001.

During 2001 there will be a change in the usage of HPSS. So far it has been used for large individual user files (20 MB to 2000 MB), central data recording for NA57 and test-beams and various data challenges. During 2001 only individual user data will be kept in HPSS with new data for the other applications going into the CASTOR system instead. This strategy was recently approved by the FOCUS committee (see the presentation Review of Current Tape Technologies and Policy in the minutes at URL: http://cern.ch/CERN/meetings/FOCUS/Focus19).