Speaker
L. Magnoni
(INFN-CNAF)
Description
Within a Grid the possibility of managing storage space is fundamental, in
particular, before and during application execution. On the other hand, the
increasing availability of highly performant computing resources raises the need for
fast and efficient I/O operations and drives the development of parallel distributed
file systems able to satisfy these needs granting access to distributed storage.
The demand of POSIX compliant access to storage and the need to have a uniform
interface for both Grid integrated and pure vanilla applications stimulate developers
to investigate the possibility to integrate already existing filesystems into a Grid
infrastructure, allowing users to take advantage of storage resources without being
forced to change their applications.
This paper describes the design and implementation of StoRM, a storage resource
manager (SRM) for disk only. Through StoRM an application can reserve and manage
space on disk storage systems. It can then access the space either in a Grid
environment or locally in a transparent way via classic POSIX calls.
The StoRM architecture is based on a pluggable model in order to easily add new
functionalities. The StoRM implementation uses now filesystems such as GPFS or
LUSTRE. The StoRM prototype includes space reservation functionalities that
complement SRM space reservation to allow applications to directly access/use the
managed space trough POSIX calls. Moreover, StoRM includes quota management
and a space guard. StoRM will serve as policy enforcement point (PEP) for the Grid
Policy Management System over disk resources. The experimental results obtained are
promising.
