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The purge threat: scientists' thoughts on peta-scale usability
| Content Provider | ACM Digital Library |
|---|---|
| Author | Holloway, Alexandra |
| Abstract | In high-performance scientific computing, users output millions of files per project or simulation, resulting in petabytes of information. Little is known about how users make sense of it all, and what the major usability issues are in interacting with a file system at scale. We conducted interviews with scientists at national laboratories to identify common practices and issues with current peta-scale file system usage. The major usability problem encountered in the interviews was the purge threat, triggered when the parallel file system reaches capacity, and warning users about impending data loss. We show that the threat is not communicated to the users of the system in a meaningful way. We present three methods scientists used to address the purge threat--analysis, automation, and subversion--and discuss how subversion of the purging system is a clear indication of its lack of utility and indicative of its cognitive complexity. We define reactionary and cautionary archiving and draw a parallel between archiving methods and data production paradigms. Finally, we propose two non-hierarchical file and directory representation models to address the purge threat. |
| Starting Page | 31 |
| Ending Page | 36 |
| Page Count | 6 |
| File Format | |
| ISBN | 9781450311038 |
| DOI | 10.1145/2159352.2159360 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| Publisher Date | 2011-11-13 |
| Publisher Place | New York |
| Access Restriction | Subscribed |
| Subject Keyword | Data purge High-performance computing Interaction File~system Peta-scale |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
