Access Patterns to Disk Cache for Large Scientific Archive

Abstract

Large scientific projects are increasing relying on analyses of data for their new discoveries; and a number of different data management systems have been developed to serve this scientific projects. In the work-in-progress paper, we describe an effort on understanding the data access patterns of one of these data management systems, dCache. This particular deployment of dCache acts as a disk cache in front of a large tape storage system primarily containing high-energy physics data. Based on the 15-month dCache logs, the cache is only accessing the tape system once for over 50 file requests, which indicates that it is effective as a disk cache. The on-disk files are repeated used, more than three times a day. We have also identified a number of unusual access patterns that are worth further investigation.