Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 23:26:32 -0800 (PST) From: asami@FreeBSD.ORG (Satoshi Asami) To: announce@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Tertiary Disk and GridPix Message-ID: <199803030726.XAA09791@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
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Tertiary Disk: Scalable, Economical Storage meets the Art World Tertiary Disk is a storage system architecture that exploits the rapidly decreasing disk price to create large disk storage systems. The name comes from twin goals: to have the cost per megabyte and capacity of tape libraries and the performance of magnetic disk drives. We use commodity, off-the-shelf components to develop a scalable, low cost, terabyte-capacity disk system. Tertiary Disk uses PCs connected by a switched network to host a large number of disks. This architecture has several advantages over traditional disk arrays: it avoids the cost of custom designed components, is more flexible, and supports incremental expansion. Our prototype consists of 20 200MHz P6 PCs that host 370 8GB IBM disks and connected through 100Mbps switched Ethernet. The PCs run FreeBSD 3.0-current with Justin Gibbs' CAM patches. The main application of Tertiary Disk is the image server called "the Zoom Project." The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have thumbnail sketches of about 65,000 objects of art, which they have been providing over the Internet for two years with a search engine. The Tertiary Disk prototype is used to serve larger versions (up to 3,072 x 2048 pixels) of the images. Cal undergrads have cleaned up about 22,000 full-sized images so far that you can zoom in and zoom out via a HTML-based user interface called "GridPix". The range is from 1/8th actual size to 4X times actual size in powers of 2. If you want to see the images yourself, go to www.thinker.org (the museum site), click on the Imagebase area, then type in your favorite artist. When a list of thumbnails appear, click on any one with a red numeral next to it, and then click on GridPix or select your screen size from the menu. You can zoom in by clicking anywhere in the image, zoom out by clicking on the magnifying glass with the minus sign, and click on ? to learn more commands. Satoshi Asami asami@freebsd.org, asami@cs.berkeley.edu This is the moderated mailing list freebsd-announce. The list contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities, important events and project milestones. See also the FreeBSD Web pages at http://www.freebsd.org To unsubscribe from freebsd-announce, send a mail to majordomo@freebsd.org with the body unsubscribe freebsd-announce To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-announce" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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