Speaker
F. Furano
(INFN Padova)
Description
This paper describes XTNetFile, the client side of a project
conceived to address the high demand data access needs of modern
physics experiments such as BaBar using the ROOT framework. In this
context, a highly scalable and fault tolerant client/server
architecture for data access has been designed and deployed which
allows thousands of batch jobs and interactive sessions to
effectively access the data repositories basing on the XROOTD data
server, a complex extension of the rootd daemon. The majority of the
communication problems are handled by the design of the client/server
mechanism and the communication protocol.
This allows us to build distributed data access systems which are
highly robust, load balanced and scalable to an extent which
allows 'no jobs to fail'.
Furthermore XTNetFile ensures backward compatibility with the 'old'
rootd server by using same API as the existing ROOT TFile/TNetFile
classes.
The code is designed with a high degree of modularity that allows to
build other interfaces, such as administrative tools, based on the
same communication layer. In addition the client plugin can also be
used to readother types of (non-ROOT I/O) data files, providing the
same benefits.
Primary authors
A. Dorigo
(INFN PADOVA)
A. Hanushevsky
(SLAC)
F. Furano
(INFN Padova)
P. Elmer
(Princeton University)
