Speaker
Description
The RAL Scientific Computing Department provides support for several large experimental facilities. These include, among others, the ISIS neutron spallation source, the Diamond X-Ray Synchrotron, the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and the RAL Central Laser Facility. We use several Ceph storage clusters to support the diverse requirements of these users.
These include Deneb, a petabyte-scale CephFS cluster, Sirius, a pure-NVMe cluster used to provide the underlying storage for STFC’s private cloud, our WLCG-focussed Echo cluster which also provides S3 and SWIFT access, and Arided, a new SSD cluster providing mountable CephFS storage to our private cloud. While all of these services use Ceph to provision the storage, each has a different architecture and usage profile.
This paper will provide an outline of these services, their development and deployment, how they are used, their hardware requirements and loadings, our experiences of supporting them as production services. We will discuss the expected development roadmaps for these services for the remainder of 2023 and going into 2024, and also provide an update on recent changes to the Echo service and its XrootD interface.
