Collaborative Research: CI-SUSTAIN: National File System Trace Repository

This project will sustain and enhance a national repository of traces that capture usage of file-systems, storage and input/outputs with the goal of helping researchers to address performance bottlenecks. As part of ongoing activities, new tools essential to the successful use of traces will be added. Also, new mirror sites are planned to expand efficiency and utility of the trace repository. The national repository of file systems traces is of immense importance to the software engineering community. By updating the traces for the new and emerging applications, this project provides a vital service to this community. Disk based file system is a performance bottleneck for many computer applications. Thus, it is useful to have a set of activity traces for storage systems to understand the access characteristics. Such traces may potentially help optimize flash-based solid-state storage and other emerging non-volatile memory based storage technologies. As the storage technologies evolve with network storage, cloud-based storage, geo-replicated storage, the trace repository provides a set of targets for storage systems optimization.