A User Interface for a Tape Library Model
Senior Project: 1991-1992
Eric Keighin, Steven Saliman, Sean Stasica and Harijono Tedjo
The StorageTek Simulation Modeling Group developed a discrete event simulation
model of the 4400 ACS, which is used to predict the performance of tape library
configurations. The program utilizes information stored in two data files to
simulate system performance. The first data file is a configuration file; it
describes the physical system. Information in this file includes the number and
types of silos, the number and types of tape drives, and the locations of
passthru ports. The second data file is a job description file. The information
in this file specifies the characteristics of the workload. Data such as the
number of mounts to attempt per hour, the skewing of the workload, and the
amount of data to transfer is contained in this file.
The program had the potential of being an excellent field engineering tool. Its
only drawback was the difficulty in developing and maintaining the data files
used to describe the simulations. The purpose of the project was to develop a
program that provides a user interface to create and modify the data files. The
software guided the user through the steps necessary to specify the data file,
prevented the user from specifying illegal configurations, and then generated
the appropriate syntactically and semantically correct data files
automatically. The program, developed using an object-oriented approach in C++,
runs on both the UNIX and DOS operating systems.
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