Probe: A Testbed for Storage Technology and Collaboration

This project is no longer active.

Probe was a storage technology research and development project undertaken jointly by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Computer Science and Mathematics Division and NERSC at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The collaborative effort of the two National Laboratories provided a wide-area distributed-storage technology testbed for storage and network system research.

Probe allowed testing of new storage hardware and software for storage systems, including HPSS. Hardware devices such as servers, network interfaces, switches, and storage devices were tested using Probe, and new software including protocols and database technologies could be developed using the Probe testbed.

The Probe page at ORNL contains a complete archive of the project.

Here is configuration information for ORNL and NERSC.

Here are notes on selected Probe projects (note that ALL our reports are subject to our Disclaimer):

• Globus File Yanker
• Preliminary testing of the iSCSI Cisco SN 5420
• IBM LTO (Linear Tape Open) Testing
• Exploration of Cache Behavior Using HPSS Per-File Transfer Logs
• Texas Memory System Testing
• Fibre Channel Disk Array Testing
• Testing, Tuning, and Configuring NERSC's Data Direct Disk Array for Thruput
• Experience Testing Network Bandwidth with Probe
• HSI 3rd Party Research Project