SDSC’s High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) reaches the milestone of one petabyte of stored data — the equivalent of 500 million pages of text, which would fill the Library of Congress more than eight times over.

The world’s largest academic production archival storage system, SDSC’s HPSS, reached a capability of warehousing up to six petabytes of data at that time allowing users to manage, access, and use data-intensive applications at top speeds without interruption. The HPSS installation was a centralized file management and storage system that served as a reliable, long-term file space for SDSC’s local and national users. Researchers who used SDSC’s computing facilities often required huge amounts of storage space for the data they generated from experiments, computer simulations and field observations. Because storage space was limited on their local computer systems and on most SDSC computing platforms, many researchers transferred their data to SDSC’s HPSS.