HSI is a friendly interface for users of the High Performance Storage System (HPSS). It is intended to provide a familiar Unix-style environment for working within the HPSS environment, while automatically taking advantage of the power of HPSS (e.g. for high speed parallel file transfers) without requiring any special user interaction, where possible.

Multi-Site Users:

HSI requires one of the following authentication methods (see the HSI User Guide for more information):

• DCE (the default method at NERSC)
• Kerberos
• DCE keytab (using a keytab file generated for you by the HPSS system administrators; NERSC does not use this method)
• Globus GSI

NERSC Users will continue to get automaticlly connected to the Archive system when HSI is invoked with no arguments. Those wishing to make connections to other sites will need to use the Open commands within HSI, or to invoke HSI with full site and security specification options.

Release Information

HSI is currently being upgraded from version 2.6 to version 2.8 - please see the release notes for more information.

Features

HSI's features include:

Familiar Unix-style command interface, with commands such as "LS", "CD", etc.

Interactive, batch, or "one-liner" execution modes

Ability to interactively pipe data into or out of HPSS, using filters such as "TAR"

Recursive option is available for most commands; including the ability to copy an entire directory tree to or from HPSS with a single simple command

Conditional put and get operations, including ability to update based on file timestamps

Automatically uses HPSS parallel I/O features for file transfer operations

Multi-threaded I/O within a single process space

Command aliases and abbreviations

10 working directories

Ability to read command input from a file, and write log or command output to a file.

Non-DCE version runs on most major Unix-based platforms

Non-DCE version provides the ability to connect to multiple HPSS systems and perform 3rd-party copies between the systems, using a "virtual drive" path notation.

Acknowledgments

The National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) and the PROBE project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have funded many of the recent HSI improvements.

Caveats

Although HSI is freely available to the HPSS community, it is an unsupported user-contributed product.