An Energy Efficient Storage System for Astronomical Observation Data on Dome A

In recent years, the research community has initiated different efforts to save energy consumption of the storage system in practical application scenarios. However, restricted by Antarctic environmental conditions, general-purpose energy-saving technologies of storage system are not applicable for Antarctic astronomical observations. In this paper, a new energy efficient storage system (called MCS-SSD) for astronomical observation data on Dome A is designed, which uses multi-level caching strategy with SSD. To boost the data disks’ performance, MCS-SSD clusters correlated files and places them on the data disk via a temporal and spatial manner. MCS-SSD further designs the prefetching and caching techniques to create larger disk idle time intervals, then the disks that are not in use within a certain time will be powered down. MCS-SSD is evaluated on a trace driven simulator in TB data level and PB data level storage systems, and the results show that compared with existing energy efficient architectures the energy consumption of MCS-SSD is reduced about 39.34 % to 58.43 %.