Theme

The Crisis in Massive Storage — Solutions or Calamities

Twenty years ago, in Monterey, the theme of the Tenth IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems was "Crisis in Mass Storage" and focused on an ever-widening gap between the development of raw hardware technologies and the need for integrated storage systems. Without greater emphasis on the development of effective storage systems, users with data-intensive applications would be left without solutions to support their science and results. The more things change, perhaps, the more they remain the same.

The high-performance computing community is engrossed in a quest for exascale environments by the end of the next decade. Data-intensive applications run, today, on numerically-intensive supercomputers and on specialized architectures customized for massive data. Once again, gaps loom between new computing technologies and the need for massive storage. Are we stuck in the past, developing 1990s-style solutions to problems of 2010 and beyond? MSST2010 explores the new requirements and drivers of the 21st century, the latest storage system architectural ideas, advances in data management techniques, and a look at how emerging technologies may lead to solutions.