A High Performance Data Server Optimized for HEP Data

This paper appears in the CD ROM version of Proceedings of the '97 Computing in High Energy Physics, Berlin, Germany, April, 1997. Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint 13 May exploiting HEP application characteristics. That is, we attempt to cope with the HEP-raised challenge by HEP-specific characteristics. Although we intend the data server to be an inexpensive and high performance alternative to general purpose DBMSs or storage managers, we believe that optimization techniques developed for the data server should also be useful when tuning those general purpose systems for HEP data. 2 Design Our design approach is: (1) to support parallelism and prefetching at various levels, (2) to avoid reading unnecessary data, and (3) to provide only limited functionality for rare operations (e.g. update). For example, logging and transaction management is performed at a higher level (on much fewer data). HEP application characteristics allow us to take this aggressive and optimistic approach