Jason Hick
Biographical Sketch
Jason Hick graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1996 with a B.S. in Computer Science. After spending five years in the Field Artillery as a Fire Support Officer, Support Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, and Battalion Supply Officer he transitioned to a career as a software developer at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in 2001.
At LANL, Jason worked as a developer in the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) collaboration. In 2005, Jason served as team leader for the Data Storage Team with responsibility for a site-wide Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup solution and two HPSS multi-PB archives supporting the Advanced Scientific Computing Initiative and the follow-on Advanced Simulation & Computing programs.
Jason joined NERSC in 2006 and is currently the Storage Systems Group Lead. The group has responsibility for providing center-wide file system and archival storage to NERSC users. His personal areas of focus are in storage planning and management, software development, and database administration. He also serves as HPSS Technical Committee chairperson for LBNL and President of the Large Tape Users Group (LTUG).
Conference Papers
Neal Master, Matthew Andrews, Jason Hick, Shane Canon, Nicholas J. Wright, “Performance Analysis of Commodity and Enterprise Class Flash Devices”, Petascale Data Storage Workshop (PDSW), November 2010,
Sim A., Gunter D., Natarajan V., Shoshani A., Williams D., Long J., Hick J., Lee J., Dart E., “Efficient Bulk Data Replication for the Earth System Grid”, Data Driven E-science: Use Cases and Successful Applications of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (Isgc 2010), Springer-Verlag New York Inc, 2010, 435,
Kettimuthu Raj, Sim Alex, Gunter Dan, Allcock Bill, Bremer Peer T., Bresnahan John, Cherry Andrew, Childers Lisa, Dart Eli, Foster Ian, Harms Kevin, Hick Jason, Lee Jason, Link Michael, Long Jeff, Miller Keith, Natarajan Vijaya, Pascucci Valerio, Raffenetti Ken, Ressman David, Williams Dean, Wilson Loren, Winkler Linda, “Lessons Learned from Moving Earth System Grid Data Sets over a 20 Gbps Wide-Area Network”, Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing HPDC 10, New York NY USA, 2010, 316--319,
A. Sim, D. Gunter, V. Natarajan, A. Shoshani, D. Williams, J. Long, J. Hick, J. Lee, E. Dart, “Efficient Bulk Data Replication for the Earth System Grid”, International Symposium on Grid Computing, 2010,
Books
A. Shoshani, D. Rotem, Scientific Data Management: Challenges, Technology, and Deployment, Book, (December 16, 2009)
This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the latest techniques for managing data during scientific exploration processes, from data generation to data analysis.
Presentation/Talks
N. Balthaser, J. Hick, W. Hurlbert, StorageTek Tape Analytics: Pre-Release Evaluation at LBNL, LTUG 2012, April 25, 2012,
A report to the Large Tape Users Group (LTUG) annual conference on a pre-release evaluation of the new software product, StorageTek Tape Analytics (STA). We provide a user's perspective on what we found useful, some suggestions for improvement, and some key new features that would enhance the product.
J. Hick, NERSC Site Update (NGF), SPXXL Winter 2012, January 10, 2012,
- Download File: SPXXL2012NERSCupdate.pdf (pdf: 1.8 MB)
Update to NERSC Global File (NGF) System, based on IBM's GPFS, to the SPXXL User Group community. Includes an overview of NERSC, the file systems that comprise NGF, some of our experiences with GPFS, and recommendations for improving scalability.
M. Cary, J. Hick, A. Powers, HPC Archive Solutions Made Simple, Half-day Tutorial at Super Computing (SC11), November 13, 2011,
- Download File: SC11ArchiveTutorialFinal.pdf (pdf: 2.9 MB)
Half-day tutorial at SC11 where attendees were provided detailed information about HPC archival storage systems for general education. The tutorial was the first SC tutorial to cover the topic of archival storage and helped sites to understand the characteristics of these systems, the terminology for archives, and how to plan, size and manage these systems.
J. Hick, Digital Archiving and Preservation in Government Departments and Agencies, Oracle Open World 2011, October 6, 2011,
- Download File: NERSCOpenWorld2011.pdf (pdf: 3.2 MB)
Attendees of this invited talk at Oracle Open World 2011 heard about the NERSC Storage Systems Group and the HPSS Archive and Backup systems we manage. Includes information on why we use disk and tape to store data, and an introduction to the Large Tape Users Group (LTUG).
J. Hick, The NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF), Computing in Atmospheric Sciences 2011 (CAS2K11), September 13, 2011,
- Download File: HickNERSCNGF.pdf (pdf: 1.6 MB)
Provides the Computing in Atmospheric Sciences 2011 conference attendees an overview and configuration details of the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF). Includes a few lessons learned and future directions for NGF.
J. Hick, M. Andrews, Leveraging the Business Value of Tape, FujiFilm Executive IT Summit 2011, June 9, 2011,
- Download File: Fuji2011BusinessValueOfTape.pdf (pdf: 5.1 MB)
Describes how tape is used in the HPSS Archive and HPSS Backup systems at NERSC. Includes some examples of our organizations tape policies, our roadmap to Exascale and an example of tape in the Exascale Era, our observed tape reliability, and an overview of our locally developed Parallel Incremental Backup System (PIBS) which performs backups of our NGF file system.
J. Hick, Storage Supporting DOE Science, Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) 2011, May 12, 2011,
- Download File: PASIGLBNLStorage.pdf (pdf: 6.6 MB)
Provided attendees of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group conference attendees with an overview of NERSC, the Storage Systems Group, and the HPSS Archives and NGF File Systems we support. Includes some information on a large tape data migration and our observations on the reliability of tape at NERSC.
D. Hazen, J. Hick, W. Hurlbert, M. Welcome, Media Information Record (MIR) Analysis, LTUG 2011, April 19, 2011,
- Download File: NERSCMIRAnalysis2011.pdf (pdf: 5.6 MB)
Presentation of Storage Systems Group findings from a year-long effort to collect and analyze Media Information Record (MIR) statistics from our in-production Oracle enterprise tape drives at NERSC. We provide information on the data collected, and some highlights from our analysis. The presentation is primarily intended to declare that the information in the MIR is important to users or customers to better operating and managing their tape environments.
J. Hick, I/O Requirements for Exascale, Open Fabrics Alliance 2011, April 4, 2011,
- Download File: OFANERSCExascaleIO.pdf (pdf: 6.6 MB)
This talk provides an overview of the DOE Exascale effort, high level IO requirements, and an example of exascale era tape storage.
D. Hazen, J. Hick, HPSS v8 Metadata Conversion, HPSS 8.1 Pre-Design Meeting, April 7, 2010,
Provided information about the HPSS metadata conversion software to other developers of HPSS. Input was important to establishing a design for the version 8 HPSS metadata conversions.
J. Hick, Sun StorageTek Tape Hardware Migration Experiences, LTUG 2009, April 24, 2009,
- Download File: LTUG09HardwareLessonsLearned.pdf (pdf: 1.2 MB)
Talk addresses specific experiences and lessons learned in migrating our entire HPSS archive from StorageTek 9310 Powderhorns using 9840A, 9940B, and T10KA tape drives to StorageTek SL8500 Libraries using 9840D and T10KB tape drives.
Reports
J. Hick, J. Hules, A. Uselton, “DOE HPC Best Practices Workshop: File Systems and Archives”, Workshop, September 27, 2011,
- Download File: 5BPWS-report.pdf (pdf: 11 MB)
The Department of Energy has identified the design, implementation, and usability of file systems and archives as key issues for current and future HPC systems. This workshop addresses current best practices for the procurement, operation, and usability of file systems and archives. Furthermore, the workshop addresses whether system challenges can be met by evolving current practices.
D. Cook, J. Hick, J. Minton, H. Newman, T. Preston, G. Rich, C. Scott, J. Shoopman, J. Noe, J. O'Connell, G. Shipman, D. Watson, V. White, “HPSS in the Extreme Scale Era: Report to DOE Office of Science on HPSS in 2018–2022”, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory technical report LBNL-3877E, 2010, LBNL 3877E
W. Allcock, R. Carlson, S. Cotter, E. Dart, V. Dattoria, B. Draney, R. Gerber, M. Helm, J. Hick, S. Hicks, S. Klasky, M. Livny, B. Maccabe, C. Morgan, S. Morss, L. Nowell, D. Petravick, J. Rogers, Y. Sekine, A. Sim, B. Tierney, S. Turnbull, D. Williams, L. Winkler, F. Wuerthwein, “ASCR Science Network Requirements”, Workshop, April 15, 2009,
- Download File: ASCR-Net-Req-Workshop-2009-Final-Report.pdf (pdf: 4.5 MB)
ESnet publishes reports from Network and Science Requirement Workshops on a regular basis. This report was the product of a two-day workshop in Washington DC that addresses science requirements impacting operations of networking for 2009.
A. Mokhtarani, W. Kramer, J. Hick, “Reliability Results of NERSC Systems”, Web site, August 28, 2008,
- Download File: LBNL-934480.pdf (pdf: 1.2 MB)
In order to address the needs of future scientific applications for storing and accessing large amounts of data in
an efficient way, one needs to understand the limitations of current technologies and how they may cause system
instability or unavailability. A number of factors can impact system availability ranging from facility-wide
power outage to a single point of failure such as network switches or global file systems. In addition, individual
component failure in a system can degrade the performance of that system. This paper focuses on analyzing both
of these factors and their impacts on the computational and storage systems at NERSC. Component failure data
presented in this report primarily focuses on disk drive in on of the computational system and tape drive failure
in HPSS. NERSC collected available component failure data and system-wide outages for its computational and
storage systems over a six-year period and made them available to the HPC community through the Petascale
Data Storage Institute.
Web Articles
“NERSC Exceeds Reliability Standards With Tape-Based Active Archive”, Active Archive Alliance Case Study, February 10, 2012,
- Download File: AAA-Case-Study-NERSC-FINAL2-6-12.pdf (pdf: 426 KB)
“NERSC: Proving Tape as Cost-Effective and Reliable Primary Data Storage”, M. Peters, Web site, December 1, 2010,
“Re-thinking data strategies is critical to keeping up”, J. Hick, HPC Source Magazine, June 1, 2010,
- Download File: SC08HPC1Big-Picture.pdf (pdf: 93 KB)
