Fifth NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies

This document contains copies of those technical papers received in time for publication prior to the Fifth Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies held September 17 - 19, 1996, at the University of Maryland, University Conference Center in College Park, Maryland. As one of an ongoing series, this conference continues to serve as a unique medium for the exchange of information on topics relating to the ingestion and management of substantial amounts of data and the attendant problems involved. This year's discussion topics include storage architecture, database management, data distribution, file system performance and modeling, and optical recording technology. There will also be a paper on Application Programming Interfaces (API) for a Physical Volume Repository (PVR) defined in Version 5 of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Reference Model (RM). In addition, there are papers on specific archives and storage products

Distributed Large Data-Object Management Architecture

We are exploring the use of highly distributed computing and storage architectures to provide all aspects of collecting, storing, analyzing, and accessing large data-objects. These data-objects can be anywhere from tens of MBytes to tens of GBytes in size. Examples are: single large images from electron microscopes, video images such as cardio-angiography, sets of related images such as MRI data and images and numerical data such as the output from a particle accelerator experiment.The sources of such data objects are often remote from the users of the data and from available large-scale storage and computation systems. Our Large Data-object Management system provides network interface between the object sources, the data management system and the user of the data. As the data is being stored, a cataloguing system automatically creates and stores condensed versions of the data, textual metadata and pointers to the original data. The catalogue system provides a Web based graphical inter..