Distributed Computing Services project

SCD's Distributed Computing Services (DCS) project is an effort aimed at facilitating NCAR computing by delivering widely-deployable, intuitive, platform-independent, standards-based user interfaces to select NCAR computing resources. These computing resources currently include: The NCAR Mass Storage System (MSS) and Data Interchange (Import/Export) services.

Phase one of the DCS effort, development and deployment of an MSS metadata-access command suite, was executed in FY97. The DCS MSS metadata interface has completely replaced its decade-old, MASnet-based predecessor. The new interface, which presents the MSS to the user in a manner consistent with the ubiquitous POSIX (UNIX) file system NCAR users are most familiar with, has been made available on all major SCD compute platforms. Over a quarter of a million metadata transactions were processed by the DCS system in FY97.

The second phase of the DCS project, providing MSS file transfer capability, entered a friendly-user phase this report period. The DCS MSS file-transfer environment offers NCAR users powerful new capabilities including:

Support for recursive and multi-file copies
Support for client hosts that lack direct network-attachment to the MSS
Platform independence
Familiar UNIX-like semantics

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