EOS 2023 Workshop
The 7th EOS workshop is in preparation to bring together the EOS community.
The 3 1/2 day in-person event is organized to provide a platform for exchange between developers, users and sites running EOS. The workshop takes place at CERN in the IT Auditorium.
The workshop will cover a wide range of topics related to EOS development, operations, deployments, applications, collaborations and various use-cases!
- EOS Seminars for Users and Admins
- EOS Development and Operations
- CTA Development and Operations
- Storage, Data Management and Applications
Timetable
The workshop will be kicked-off with a seminar Monday morning for end-users explaining EOS from a user perspective, tips and tricks how to use it in the best way and necessary background about the CERN setup.
The afternoon seminar will explain EOS from an admin perspective and deep-dive into details of all components of EOS.
The second day will focus on new developments and improvements since the previous workshop, the project roadmap, EOS operations and site reports.
The third day is dedicated to the CERN Tape Archive project (CTA) and its community.
The morning of the fourth day will be dedicated to the EOS ecosystem:
- Monitoring
- Windows Access
- Application/Services
- XRootD Framework
- EOS Roadmap
Recordings
All presentation will be recorded and published with previous agreement of the speaker.
Fees
The workshop participation will be without fee.
Registrations
Registration is open to anyone.
Please register yourself to the workshop. Don't forget to submit an abstract if you would like to share your experience/ideas within the EOS community.
If you are interested in joining the EOS community, this is the perfect occasion!
We look forward to having you at the in-person workshop in April 2023!
Your CERN EOS team.
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EOS Seminars: EOS for Endusers 503/1-001 - Council Chamber
User and Administration Seminar
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1
EOS for Users - how to use the CERN physics storage system most effectively
The IT storage group provides end-user access to a 700 PB disk storage system: CERN EOS.
In this seminar we will explain your possibilities to use EOS storage as a CERN user most effectively for everyone!Part 1 : Dive into the EOS eco-system
We will start with a brief introduction:
How is the EOS service deployed and segmented? How do you get access to EOS storage and how you can authenticate to the service?We will explain the various access interfaces:
- Command line access using the shell
- Using EOS as a filesystem /eos/
- Remote access protocols root:// and https://
- Accessing EOS from applications like ROOT, C++, Python …
- The CERNBox web interfaceYou will learn, how you share access to files, folders or subtrees with your colleagues, how the permission systems of EOS and CERNBox interact, how you get an EOS drive on your Mac, Linux or Windows computer, how you can verify your quota, how you can understand where you use most of your space, how you can access EOS from outside CERN, what are the best access method for applications and many more useful hints for your daily work.
We will finish with a short list of features, which are configured to mitigate user errors and service downtimes:
-Service & Data high-availability model
-Backup system
-File Versioning
-Undo Deletion using the EOS recycle binIf you deleted all your files, how can you get them back? Can you?
Part 2: Running workflows using EOS storage
This part will cover best practices for running interactive and batch workflows using EOS storage with few examples on a laptop/desktop, lxplus, the batch farm etc.
What can you do to get efficient data access and what you should never do! How can you authenticate from GITLAB to EOS?
We will also briefly give some insights, how EOS service managers might influence or change your access to EOS.
Speakers: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN), Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN), Luca Mascetti (CERN), Roberto Valverde Cameselle (CERN)
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EOS Seminars: EOS for Administrators 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
User and Administration Seminar
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EOS for Administrators
In this seminar we will go through the architecture of EOS, showcase some EOS instanace configuration and follow with an introduction to CTA!
We will explain some generic concepts, deployment models, hardware requirements, redundancy models, storage layout, scheduling & file placement - CPU, Storage and Network requirements and few tricks to optimize these. We highlight in detail the XRootD framework and how EOS is implemented using it. We will go through all components and sub services of the namespace service MGM, what there role is and point you to the relevant documentation.
The second part will showcase some EOS instances and some of their configuration at CERN.
In the third part of the presentation we will introduce the CERN Tape Archive CTA.
We hope there is enough time available to keep the seminar interactive and allow for questions during the presentation.
Speakers: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN), Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN), Michael Davis (CERN)
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EOS Development: Morning Session 1 31/3-004 - IT AmphitheatreConveners: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN), Enrico Bocchi (CERN)
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Workshop Introduction
Logistics & Information.
Speaker: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN) -
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EOS 5 Developments
An overview about the developments since the last workshop.
Speaker: Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN) -
5
The EOS namespace locking - demystification and optimization
[To be filled]
Speaker: Cedric Caffy (CERN) -
6
Improving File Scheduling for EOS
We take a look at the geoscheduler and see how we can introduce a new lock-free scheduling alogorithm
Speaker: Abhishek Lekshmanan (CERN) -
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eosxd/3 - FUSE filesystem using libfuse2/3
This presentation will highlight the changes and improvements for the EOS filesystem access using libfuse2/3.
Speaker: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN)
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10:30
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EOS Development: Morning Session 2 31/3-004 - IT AmphitheatreConvener: Enrico Bocchi (CERN)
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Retiring LevelDBs with the new FST attr backend
Until EOS version 5.1.8, FST metadata on FSTs were stored in a leveldb, which was often heavily contended during writes. We added a feature to move the metadata to attributes. With a minimal configuration, we should be able to switch to the new backend and FSTs automatically move from one backend to another at startup. Additionally there is some tooling to inspect all this. We briefly explain all of this so that sites can get ready to use the new backend.
Speaker: Abhishek Lekshmanan (CERN) -
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Fsck to the rescue
This talk will describe the fsck mechanism, the various options when it comes to controlling the repair process and the internal process of deciding whether a file can be fixed or not.
Speaker: Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN) -
10
Balancing and Draining Groups with the GroupBalancer and Drainer
New improvements in the exisiting GroupBalancer and introduction of functionality to drain whole groups. We look at the various configuration options to run these and how these work under the hood.
Speaker: Abhishek Lekshmanan (CERN) -
11
What you wish you knew about ... tokens!
This presentation gives an overview of the token support in EOS. We'll discuss the configuration options, what plugins need to be enabled for the various protocols and how to configure them. Besides this, we'll trace one particular request using tokens to see how it interacts with the existing authentication/authorization features that already exists in EOS and provide some helpful examples.
Speaker: Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN) -
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Local vs Remote - High Performance Benchmarking
This presentation includes performance benchmarks comparing local and remote IO for various use-cases, storage stacks and protocols.
Speaker: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN)
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12:00
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EOS Operation & Sites: Afternoon Session 1 31/3-004 - IT AmphitheatreConvener: Cristian Contescu (CERN)
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EOS Status at IHEP
The Institute of High Energy Physics undertakes many large scientific engineering projects in China. These large scientific projects generate a large amount of data every year and require a computing platform for analysis and processing.
EOS is one of the main storage system at IHEP since 2016. The EOS instance at IHEP has currently a gross capacity of 50 PB. Currently we have deployed 6 instances and will add new experimental instances in the future, such as HERD experiment.
The presentation will give an overview about the deployment status at IHEP, the work we are doing around EOS and the development plans for 2023.Speaker: LI Haibo lihaibo -
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EOS instance at the Joint Research Centre
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission is running the Big Data Analytics Platform (BDAP) to enable the JRC projects to store, process, and analyze a wide range of data. The platform evolved as a core service for JRC scientists to produce knowledge and insights in support of EU policy making.
EOS is the main storage system of the BDAP for scientific data. It is in increasing use at JRC since 2016. The Big Data Analytics Platform is actively used by more than 70 JRC projects, covering a large variety of data analytics activities. The EOS instance at JRC has currently a gross capacity of 30 PB with an additional increase planned throughout 2023.
The presentation will give an overview about EOS as storage back-end of the Big Data Analytics Platform. It covers the general set-up and current status, experiences made, issues discovered, and an outlook of planned activities and changes in 2023.
Speaker: Armin Burger (JRC) -
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EOS Storage Element Status at IHEP
The EOS system serving as a grid storage element at IHEP, CAS started since 2021, working for JUNO experiment. A CTA with its EOS SE buffer also started its service for JUNO since 2023. In this talk, we would like to share our experiences and thoughts about the SE operations, including deployment, monitoring, data transfer performance, authentication management with VOMS and Sci-token, etc.
Meanwhile, as EOS SE will replace the DPM as our new Beijing-T2 site storage system, this talk will also share our plan and status about EOS upgrading.
The Beijing LHCb T1 site storage construction status will also be included in this talk.Speaker: Xuantong Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)) -
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EOS deployment at GRIF
to.be.specified
Speaker: Dr Emmanouil Vamvakopoulos (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)) -
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A computational storage plugin implemented in EOS to support in-situ data processing on storage servers
Computational storage involves integrating compute resources with storage devices or systems to enable data processing within the storage device. This approach reduces data movement, enhances processing efficiency, and reduces costs. To facilitate in-situ data processing on storage servers, we developed a computational storage plugin that can be added to EOS FST. This plugin enables users to deploy compute resources directly within the storage servers, allowing them to perform data processing operations on the data stored in the FST nodes without having to move the data to a separate computing system. This can reduce latency and improve overall performance, especially when processing large volumes of data.
The plugin can be extended to support a variety of data processing tasks, including data filtering, compression, encryption, and machine learning. The computational storage function is defined in a configuration that can be implemented in scripting languages or evolved independently of the storage system in the form of containers.
When an FST node receives a request to open a file, the plugin is executed first. It then calls the target program on the storage server by parsing the parameters of the command to open the file. At this time, the input file must be on the FTS storage server, and the plugin also writes the output file to the node. At the end of the task execution, the output file is automatically registered into the MGM server.
Client access is fully compatible with XRootD's API and EOS commands. Users can add tasks and parameters to be performed in the open option. The plugin has been tested and applied in the data processing of the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), and the results show that the efficiency of data decoding is more than 5 times higher than the original method.Speaker: Dr Yaodong Cheng (Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) -
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HDFS to EOS migration - Purdue site report
In 2022 the CMS Tier-2 at Purdue University migrated its 10PB storage system from HDFS to EOS. Here we report on the details of the process, the difficulties we encountered and the ways in which we solved them. We also report on the current status of the storage system, and our future plans.
Speaker: Stefan Piperov (Purdue University (US))
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15:40
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EOS Operation & Sites: Afternoon Session 2 31/3-004 - IT AmphitheatreConvener: Luca Mascetti (CERN)
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EOS at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center
Fermilab has been running an EOS instance since testing began in June 2012. By May 2013, before becoming production storage, there was 600TB allocated for EOS. Today, there is approximately 13PB of storage available in the EOS instance.
The LPC cluster is a 4500-core user analysis cluster with 13 PB of EOS storage. The LPC cluster supports several hundred active CMS users at any given time.
An update of our current experiences and challenges running an EOS instance for use by the Fermilab LHC Physics Center (LPC) computing cluster. Planning the upgrade to EOS 5 and moving to Almalinux before EOL for SL7.
Speaker: Dan Szkola (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) -
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EOS for a T2 Storage Element on Kubernetes
I will discuss our efforts to deploy EOS on Kubernetes at the University of Victoria T2 site for ATLAS, using a Helm chart and CephFS storage.
Speaker: Ryan Taylor (University of Victoria (CA)) -
21
Operation Status of CDS for ALICE experiment
We present the current operation status of CDS (the Disk-based Custodial Storage) for ALICE experiment. The CDS is based on EOS Erasure Coding implementation with four parity mode to match with Tape based archival storage in terms of data protection. We will discuss briefly the plan of CDS operation automation for hardware intervention, especially the disk replacement, and of its expansion to meet the upcoming pledges. Also we will discuss the cost analysis of CDS for long-term basis.
Speaker: Sang Un Ahn (Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KR)) -
22
EOS for ALICE O2 - Evolution and challenges (2022 - 2023)
2022 was a critical year which had some operational impact on all systems and services. In this talk we are going to present a few operational decisions, their implication on the EOS storage for the ALICE data taking and how we implemented mitigations by bringing improvements to the operations model as well as to the software stack.
Speaker: Cristian Contescu (CERN)
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Social Dinner: Dinner at Luigia AcademyConvener: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN)
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CTA: Morning Session 1 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
CERN Tape Archive
Convener: Dr Jaroslav Guenther (CERN)-
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Welcome and Introduction
Welcome to the second annual CTA Day at the EOS Workshop!
In mid-2022, the LHC awoke from its second Long Shutdown and restarted physics operations. Run-3 data-taking rates are several times higher than during Run-2; already CTA hit a new record of 26 PB archived in one month in November 2022.
This presentation will introduce the CTA Project, Team and Community, as well as an overview of the challenges and achievements during the first year of Run-3.
Speaker: Michael Davis (CERN) -
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mhVTL : Mark Harvey's Virtual Tape Library
Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) have been widely used in data storage environments. mhVTL design goals are unique in it is not attempting to be a better tape library, simply emulate real hardware—for those situations where it is impractical to carry a physical tape library with you.
Speaker: Mark Harvey -
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Restic CTA at AARNet
Since 2021, AARNet have been using restic backup software in conjunction with CTA to backup user data in production EOS clusters. The road to production has not been without its challenges, requiring us to modify restic and create a custom backup scheduler and client workflows. This presentation will aim to cover the architecture, with a focus on restic: the basics, the customisations and integration with CTA.
Speaker: Denis Sergeevich Lujanski -
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Antares: the first year in production
Antares is the new tape archive service at RAL Tier-1 that went into production on 4th of March 2022. The service is built around the EOS/CTA technologies developed at CERN. EOS is the user facing service that manages the incoming namespace requests and a thin SSD buffer, and CTA is deployed as the tape back-end system. In this talk, we describe the setup of ANTARES and discuss the service’s performance as well as the main operational issues since the beginning of LHC Run-3. Finally, we provide an overview of the future plans for the expansion of the service to cover the whole of the high energy physics and astronomy community in the UK.
Speaker: George Patargias -
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CTA Status and Future at IHEP
We will share our experiences on EOS CTA and talk about our plan for the future of CTA. All experiments of IHEP have adopted CTA as the main tape storage management system, and preparing a new tape library for TIER1 of LHCb. We've test the tape restful API with X509 and token auth to access EOS & CTA via HTTP as well as XRootD. In the future, we shall upgrade our production instances to EOS & CTA 5, and deploy FTS services for CTA data transmission.
Speaker: Dr Yujiang BI (Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) -
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CTA efforts at Fermilab
Fermilab has decided to replace Enstore, its locally developed tape management system, with CTA. Fermilab runs two Enstore instances: CMS with a small, dedicated tape buffer and Public operating like an HSM with tight integration between dCache and Enstore
This talk will cover:
- Metadata migration from Enstore to CTA
- Results of dCache integration with CTA at FNAL
- Performance testing and monitoring
- Thoughts on integrating Enstore's "small file aggregation" (SFA) feature (Public instance only)
- Timeframe for migrations
Reading of physical Enstore tapes is discussed in Jorge's OSM talk
Speaker: Eric Vaandering (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))
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10:30
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CTA: Morning Session 2 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
CERN Tape Archive
Convener: Joao Afonso (CERN)-
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CTA at DESY
Since early 2021 CTA has been on a test bed at DESY. Having observed no flies in the ointment and seamless integration with dCache in-place, CTA advances to production in 2023. This presentation will give an overview of the current migration and deployment status as well as future plans at DESY.
Speaker: Mwai Karimi (DESY) -
30
CTA at PIC
At PIC, we currently have Enstore as our tape storage system, but due to the discontinuation of its support and development in the near future, we want to share our experiences and insights about the testing and implementation of Cern Tape Archive (CTA) as a potential replacement.
We have set up a CTA test instance integrated with dCache in order to evaluate its functionalities and work on how to adapt our preexisting tape infrastructure and design. Our goal is to provide some valuable information to the CTA community, including our experience, thoughts and any challenges we have encountered during this process, future steps and plans.
Speaker: Mrs Elisabet Carrasco Santos (PIC-IFAE) -
31
Technical challenges of tape instance consolidation at RAL
At RAL, we intend to consolidate the two CASTOR instances into a single CTA instance with multiple EOS disk buffers, similar to the CERN architecture. The 'WLCGTape' Castor instance has been fully migrated to CTA at RAL, and has been running in production for LHC run 3 data taking.
In preparation for the migration of the 'Facilities' CASTOR instance at RAL onto our CTA instance, there have been various technical hurdles to overcome. The analysis of namespace (archive file ID) clashes between CTA and the remaining CASTOR instance, and the process of resolving clashes in a repeatable and safe manner were of particular note. This talk describes the details of the analysis, and the tooling developed to enable the consolidation of our two tape instances.
Speaker: Thomas Byrne -
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How to enable EOS for tape
An EOSCTA instance is an EOS instance - commonly called a tape buffer - configured with a CERN Tape Archive (CTA) back-end.
This EOS instance is entirely bandwidth oriented: it offers an SSD based tape interconnection, it can contain spinning disks if needed and it is optimized for the various tape workflows.
This talk will present how to enable EOS for tape using CTA and the Swiss horology gears in place to maximize tape hardware usage while meeting experiment workflow requirements for xrootd and HTTP protocols.Speaker: Julien Leduc (CERN) -
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Handling failed requests
The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) is a vital system for storing and retrieving data at CERN. However, the reliability of the CTA system can be impacted by various factors, including hardware failures, software bugs, and network connectivity issues. To ensure the continued availability of the stored data, it is critical to have robust mechanisms in place for handling failed requests.
This talk will cover the strategies employed by the CTA team at CERN for managing failed requests in the system. These include techniques such as automatic retries, requests classification and file reinjection. By implementing these measures, the CTA team ensures the majority of failed files are archived to tape without user intervention during incidents and in normal operations mode.
Speaker: Volodymyr Yurchenko (CERN) -
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Monitoring your EOSCTA deployment - The general recipe
Reliable and effective monitoring is essential for smooth operations and for tailoring an EOSCTA deployment to users’ needs. Short-term monitoring provides alerting for abnormal system states, and long-term monitoring allows us to track system usage and performance over time.
In this presentation we walk you through the general setup we use for Tier-0 storage at CERN, which allows us to monitor multiple large EOSCTA MGM instances, more than 200 tape servers, and various other machines.
The tech stack is easy to access and based on the open source technologies, such as Fluentd, InfluxDB, Rundeck, and Grafana. We will give some examples on how to ingest CTA log files, aggregate monitoring data, and how turn these data points into useful metrics.Speaker: Richard Bachmann (CERN) -
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ATRESYS — Automated Tape REpacking System, a tool for managing CTA repacks and tape lifecycle
A ‘Repack’ is the process of moving or copying data from one tape cartridge to one or multiple others. Such a process may be needed for various reasons, such as transferring data to more compact media, creating additional copies, and recovering data from faulty media. At CERN the CTA software manages the data transfer itself, but more steps are needed in order to complete the full repack process for each tape cartridge.
In this presentation we will give an overview of the repack process at CERN and present ATRESYS, the tool developed to automate most of it. By using ATRESYS we are able to queue batches of hundreds of repacks and have them run their course without micro-management by operators. The tool will soon be available as free software as part of the CTA operator tools.
Speaker: Vladimir Bahyl (CERN)
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12:35
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CERN Tape Archive
Convener: Michael Davis (CERN)-
36
CTA CI: Running a standalone CTA instance with latest kubernetes
This hands-on session will focus on installing and configuring a standalone CTA CI runner:
- single host kubernetes cluster in Alma9
- 1 Virtual tape library with CTA CI requirements
At the end of this sessions the participants should be able to run CTA Continuous Integration test on their box.
Speaker: Julien Leduc (CERN)
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15:30
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CTA: Afternoon Session 2 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
CERN Tape Archive
Convener: Pablo Oliver Cortes-
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Disk File Metadata for Tape Files — Migrating, Restoring, Replicating
When updating the disk file meta data for tape files, it is necessary to do the updates in both EOS and CTA. Examples of use-cases that require these updates are migration to CTA, moving a file from one EOS instance to another, switching from single to dual copy and restoring deleted files.
The tools for handling these use-cases are not atomic, but they are idempotent and consistency is monitored. As a result, multiple executions by the operator might be necessary to ensure that EOS and CTA agree on the metadata. In the presentation we will show the steps for setting up these tools, as well as the workflow when using them.
Speaker: Lasse Tjernaes Wardenaer (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (NO)) -
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New CTA tape lifecycle
As the amount of stored data, scope and operation complexity of CTA grew, it became necessary to improve the level of control over each tape lifecycle and to provide mechanisms that allow for an improved automation of CTA operations, such as repacking.
In this presentation we will talk about the new CTA tape states, which expand the behaviour of the disabled state. This includes support for repacking tapes as a separated state. In addition, we created a new mechanism that automatically reschedules user requests after a tape state change that no longer allows it to be used for user retrieves.
Speaker: Joao Afonso (CERN) -
39
External tape readers: Integration into CTA and OSM/Enstore cases
At the EOS Workshop 2022 BoF, it was decided that CTA should add support for reading OSM/dCache and Enstore tape formats. To make this feature work seamlessly within CTA, we refactored our codebase to accommodate different tape file readers.
In this presentation, we will discuss the design and implementation of external tape format readers into CTA. We will also cover the unit and functional tests that were implemented, including testing via CTA’s CI system using an image of an OSM tape.
Speaker: Jorge Camarero Vera (CERN) -
40
CTA Challenges and Roadmap
CTA software development is primarily driven by the needs of the CERN experimental programme. Looking beyond Run-3, data rates are set to continue to rise exponentially into Run-4 and beyond. The CTA team are planning how to scale the software and service to meet these new challenges.
CTA is also driven by the needs of the community outside CERN. The landscape of tape archival for scientific data is consolidating, and CTA is constantly adapting to a wider range of use cases.
This talk will present the short-term and medium-term roadmap for CTA development and new features.
Speaker: Michael Davis (CERN) -
41
Discussion and close-out
Final comments, questions and discussion. Segue into the apéro in R2 where we can continue talking.
Speaker: Michael Davis (CERN)
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17:10
Offered Drinks / Reception 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
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EOS Ecosystem: Services, Monitoring, Framework, Roadmap 31/3-004 - IT AmphitheatreConvener: Oliver Keeble (CERN)
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42
XRootD Development Update
Latest updates about XRootD development and the March XRootD Workshop.
Speaker: Guilherme Amadio (CERN) -
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EOS 5 client rollout
A report about the deployment of the major version update of the eos client stack. From which XRootD v5 and Fuse v3 upgrades standout.
Speaker: Manuel Reis (Universidade de Lisboa (PT)) -
44
Prometheus Monitoring Exporter for EOS
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus, and the project has a very active developer and user community. CERN EOS operations team have developed a Prometheus exporter for EOS, that exposes common EOS metrics in prometheus format. This presentation will give an overview of the EOS Exporter, how to set it up and what kind of information can be visualized.
Speaker: Roberto Valverde Cameselle (CERN) -
45
A tool to visualize EOS data transfers over time
[To be filled]
Speaker: Cedric Caffy (CERN) -
46
EOS Operations at CERNSpeaker: Dr Maria Arsuaga Rios (CERN)
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EOS GUI - Simple way for EOS management
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) for CERN EOS could be crucial in the interaction between potential users and the EOS storage technology. The GUI could serve as an interface between a user and the complex EOS infrastructure, enabling non-experts to learn and discover EOS features seamlessly and effectively. This would help users interact with the storage infrastructure without needing to delve into technical complexities, making it easier to decide on the architecture and proposal for large storage organizations. Additionally, the GUI can provide a visually appealing and user-friendly interface that can enable users to carry out informative tasks such as monitoring data storage usage.
The first proposal for CERN EOS GUI is designed for the Microsoft Windows platform. The proposal specifies technologies for GUI that allow extensions to all major operating systems, resulting in an interface accessible to all users regardless of their preferred platform, including Linux and MacOS. The GUI focuses on usability and functionality, featuring intuitive navigation, clear labeling of buttons and controls, and informative feedback mechanisms. The goal is to cover three functionalities related to EOS Windows Native Client:
a) Interface to EOS commands (EOS-shell).
b) Interface to EOS cluster mounted as Windows drive letter (EOS-drive).
c) Interface to all functionalities covered by EOS commands.EOS GUI is intended to provide two ways of starting:
1) Start a program executable from the start menu or command line.
2) Start from a popup list from the system tray icon.Thus, starting the same program can be made available from multiple entry points, making it easier for users to access the GUI.
The EOS GUI should be organized into three window forms:
a) Main EOS window.
b) Popup list from the system tray icon.
c) Other popup windows.The main window would cover all EOS features available with EOS commands. The format of the main EOS window is proposed as tabs, icons, or "office style". For each of these proposed formats, all EOS features should be grouped in three to five groups represented by separate tabs, icons, or "office-style" buttons. The popup list from the system tray icon should provide shortcuts to frequently used functions, such as connecting/disconnecting EOS drives and opening the main EOS window. Other popup windows should cater to specific functionalities, such as showing detailed storage usage.
The GUI for EOS should be technically implemented as a program/application or as a Web GUI. Overall, the proposed EOS GUI should provide a user-friendly and accessible interface that allows users to carry out tasks related to EOS commands and data storage. The proposed EOS GUI is designed to provide an efficient and accessible interface for users of all levels to perform tasks related to EOS commands and data manipulation. It is not designed to replace EOS CLI but to complement it while providing a more user-friendly alternative for those less comfortable with command-line interfaces.
In summary, the proposed EOS GUI aims to provide a user-friendly interface for managing CERN EOS storage. The GUI is proposed for the Microsoft Windows platform; however, the technologies used would allow extensions to all major operating systems.
Speaker: Gregor Molan (Comtrade 360's AI Lab) -
10:35
Coffee Break
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48
EOS Windows native client: Overview
Context
An overview of the EOS Windows native client for EOS users on Windows operating systems
Objectives
EOS Windows native client should provide Windows platform users with native access to EOS cluster for both file transferring and command requests, giving them improved user experience compared to EOS Linux client.
Method
EOS Windows native client comes with two interfaces - EOS-shell (EOS-wnc command line interface) which can be run inside Command Prompt or PowerShell terminal, and EOS-drive which mounts EOS file system as Windows drive. These interfaces bring EOS file system to Windows users with the user-friendly experience they expect and require.
EOS-shell supports all the commands as EOS Linux client, together with some improvements in terms of uniform manuals for all commands, additional checks for specified parameters and autocomplete functionality for commands, command arguments and paths inside EOS space. This means that a user, specifically used to EOS Linux client can easily make the switch to EOS Windows native client seamlessly.
EOS-drive provides classic Windows experience by representing EOS file system as a drive on Windows, meaning that any user can easily manage files and directories inside EOS space, as if they are on Windows machine itself, with no need for knowledge of how to use command line interface.
By constantly testing EOS Windows native client, in Comtrade’s testing environment and against large EOS instances at CERN, alongside comparing it with other ways to access EOS file system and even with different distributed file systems, we are ensuring that EOS users on Windows will not lag behind regarding performances.
Conclusion
Developing and maintaining high-performance and user-friendly EOS client for Windows platforms should always be a priority while seeking to constantly provide possible improvements that ensure better user experience. Additionally, Windows users should be given the opportunity to benefit from EOS file system within environments they are familiar with.
Speaker: Branko Blagojevic (Comtrade) -
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EOS-drive for Windows: Architecture and file transferring system
EOS-drive is part of the EOS Windows Native Client package, it mounts the EOS filesystem as a Windows disk drive by which Windows applications interact with the EOS filesystem.
EOS-drive communicates with Windows applications through the user-mode Dokan library and kernel-mode Dokan driver. File operation requests from applications (e.g., CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile...) are sent to the Dokan driver, which is then forwarded to the Dokan library and subsequently to the EOS-drive. The results of this routine are sent back to the Windows application as a response to the operation request. The Dokan file system driver and library therefore acts as a proxy between Windows applications and the EOS-drive.
To collect data that should be sent to the Windows application as a response to an operation request, EOS-drive communicates with the EOS cluster through HTTPS protocol. EOS-drive uses the cURL library for file transferring and gRPC for metadata requests.
WriteFile and ReadFile operations are used for file transferring. Windows applications requests a process over chunks (data fragments) by providing offset and chunk size to the EOS-drive. Then, EOS-drive is made to serve Windows applications by performing WriteFile or ReadFile operations over specified chunks.
There are three mechanisms of file transferring in EOS-drive, these are: transfer chunk by chunk, transfer with the EOS-drive buffer, and single-session transfer.
Transferring chunk by chunk means that each requested chunk by the Windows applications will be uploaded/downloaded in a separate session. This method is the slowest but can be realized in any case.
Transferring with an EOS-drive buffer can be done in three different scenarios. In case of upload, EOS-drive buffers some of the chunks received from the Windows driver, sorts them if needed, and uploads them together per second. With regards to downloading “small” files, instead of downloading the requested chunk, EOS-drive will download the whole file and then use downloaded bytes for chunk requests. There is also a buffer between the upload and download process, i.e., the first part of an uploaded file will be buffered and then used for subsequent download requests.
Single-session transfer means that one session will be used for the whole file, not only for one chunk. Afterwards, if chunk requests from the driver match the incoming chunk from the EOS cluster, the chunk from the EOS cluster will then only be forwarded to the driver. Or in the opposite direction for the upload process. This method is the fastest, however, it has several restrictions.
Functionality and transfer speed are tested locally at Comtrade, as well as at CERN, therefore the best solution for file transfer in EOS-drive is single-session transfer, although this method is impossible in all situations due to many restrictions. The next best solution as per speed, is to implement transfer using the EOS-drive buffer, it is however limited per number of files to save memory resources. Subsequently, if none of the previous mechanisms can be realized, transfer chunk by chunk will be used.
Speaker: Ivan Arizanovic (Comtrade 360's AI Lab) -
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CERNBox, the Scientific Cloud powered by EOS
CERNBox combines the ease of use of a file sync and share service with the power of the scientific data processing infrastructure at CERN. Built on top of EOS and ownCloud, it provides a simple and uniform way to access over 15PB of research, administrative and engineering data across more than 2 billion files.
In this talk we will go through the latest advances made possible with the new version, released in 2022, and the new functionalities planned for this year and the future. From notifications to search or from better sync client integration to federation of heterogeneous storages, both CERNBox and EOS are evolving together to provide a more powerful and user friendly system for our community.
Speaker: Diogo Castro (CERN) -
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Empowering CERNBox users with self-service restore functionality
The IT storage group at CERN is resposible to ensure integrity and security of all the stored data for physics and general computing services. In the last years a backup orchestrator, cback, has been developed based on the open source backup software restic. Cback is able to backup EOS, CephFS and any local mountable file system, like NFS or DFS. cback is currently used to daily backup CERNBox data (2.5 billion of files and 18PB), including experiment project spaces and user home directories.
The data copy is stored in a disk-based S3 cluster in another geographical location in the CERN campus 4km away from the main data center (protecting against natural disasters). The usage of restic allows us to reduce the storage costs thanks to the deduplication of the data. In the last months, the cback portal server has been implemented, exposing a set of REST APIs to allow the intergration with end-user backup utilities to navigate snapshots and restore data.
In this presentation, we will describe the architecture and the implementation of cback, the integration with CERNBox and the future integration with tape archive (CTA) for long term data preservation.
Speaker: Gianmaria Del Monte (CERN) -
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EOS for Users Report
EOS for users service, internally known as EOSHPM (EOSHOME, EOSPROJECT and EOSMEDIA) currently stores 2.8 billion files and more than 20PB of storage. We store data of more than 45,000 users and project spaces and host multimedia related use cases for the IT Department. Data is accessed via filesystem (fuse), CERNBox (Web interface, Sync/Mobile client), SAMBA and HTTP. We will be reporting on achievements and challenges in 2022 and future service Roadmap.
Speakers: Emmanouil Bagakis (CERN), Roberto Valverde Cameselle (CERN) -
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EOS 5/6 Roadmap
We will give an overview about the development roadmap for 2023 and beyond.
Speakers: Andreas Joachim Peters (CERN), Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN)
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BoF Session - CERNBox and Sync&Share storage solutions: BoF Session 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre
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BoF Session - CERNBox and Sync&Share storage solutionsSpeaker: Hugo Gonzalez Labrador (CERN)
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