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Michael Davis (CERN)18/03/2024, 09:00
Welcome to the third annual CERN Tape Archive Workshop (CTA 2024).
The LHC experiments have completed another successful year of data taking, with new records in terms of throughput and total data archived.
This presentation will give an introduction to the CTA Project, Team and Community, as well as an overview of the challenges and achievements during the second year of LHC Run-3.
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Dr Mark Lantz (IBM)18/03/2024, 09:15
Today, magnetic tape is the lowest cost technology for storing large volumes of data. Historically, areal density scaling has been the main driver of the exponential decrease in cost, i.e. cents/GB of capacity, of both tape and hard disk drives. Recently, HDD scaling has stagnated while tape continues to scale at historical rates. The INSIC 2019-2029 Tape Technology Roadmap projects that tape...
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George Patargias18/03/2024, 11:00
Antares is the tape archive service at RAL that manages both Tier-1 and local Facilities data. In this talk, we present the main developments in the service since last year’s CTA workshop including the migration of CASTOR Facilities instance 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...
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Mwai Karimi18/03/2024, 11:15
CTA has been in production at DESY for almost an year, with dCache as the frontend. Over the course of this time we have migrated all our data from OSM, moved all experiments to CTA and so far written close to 25PB of data. In this talk we give an overview of the past year and share our overall experience with CTA.
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qiuling yao (IHEP)18/03/2024, 11:30
The presentation will provide an overview of the status and progress of CTA at IHEP. Last year, we completed the data migration from CASTOR to CTA, added new CTA instances for JUNO, HEPS, and LHCb Tier1. We compiled CTA 5.8.10 on alma9 and have commenced performance testing. Additionally, CTA has been utilized on the new tape library and LTO9 tapes.
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Richard Bachmann (CERN)18/03/2024, 11:45
At the 2nd CTA Workshop (2023), we announced a repository of Free and Open Source operator tools for CTA, including the Repack automation system (ATRESYS) tool. Since then, the repository has seen a number of new tool additions, as well as changes to the underlying libraries.
In this talk, we will introduce these new features, including tools for: automating the supply of tapes to tape...
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Richard Bachmann (CERN)18/03/2024, 12:00
The Tape Alerting System (TAS) acts automatically on issues detected in the tape infrastructure by disabling the affected elements, notifying operators of the situation requiring their attention, and thereby protecting the system from further disruption or damage to the infrastructure.
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This is done by performing a scan of a configurable time frame of past tape sessions and then executing a... -
Julien Leduc (CERN), Pablo Oliver Cortes (CERN)18/03/2024, 12:15
During three years in production at CERN as the WLCG Tier-0 tape storage service, the CTA software has evolved and gained various features driven by the service requirements. Discussions between developers and the operations have led to design choices that shaped the service and helped refine CTA operations best practices.
This presentations aims at clarifying the current operations and...
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Vlado Bahyl (CERN)18/03/2024, 14:00BoF Session
Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number and sophistication of cyberattacks on academic sites. One way to improve resilience is to store backups in a completely separate administrative domain to the data being protected. This Birds-of-a-Feather session is for site administrators who would like to discuss the possibility of backing up to each others sites.
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Pablo Oliver Cortes (CERN)18/03/2024, 14:30
The goal of this hands-on session is to be able to debug common problems that could be faced by CTA administrators or operators. We will briefly give a broad overview of all the logging generated by the different CTA services, along with a peek into our monitoring dashboards. This gives a starting point to be able to understand and debug problems that may appear while operating CTA.
After...
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Julien Leduc (CERN)18/03/2024, 16:30Hands-on
Deletions are a rare event in tape archive storage operations. When they happen, they are often the result of a user mistake or a bug. As deletion is asynchronous on the tape side, nothing is physically deleted until the tape is reclaimed. CTA keeps a copy of all the deleted file metadata so that files deleted unintentionally can be restored. This hands-on session will allow participants to...
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Denis Lujanski19/03/2024, 09:00
This presentation will aim to provide a yearly site report. This year at AARNet, we implemented tape limiting and offsite tape vaulting processes and workflows. CTA was also an integral part of decommissioning efforts of some of our storage platforms.
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Eric Vaandering (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))19/03/2024, 09:1515 Minutes
In 2024, Fermilab will replace the legacy Enstore tape management system with CTA for CMS data. This will be followed by the migration of the second instance of Enstore containing all other scientific data on tape at Fermilab.
We will detail the results of on-going scale tests of CTA. These tests target the 10% scale in tape bandwidth compared to the existing CMS Enstore instance. Tests...
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Jordi Casals Hernandez (Port d'Informació Científica)19/03/2024, 09:30
Throughout 2023, we have continued conducting operational tests to familiarize ourselves with the functionality of CTA and understand the differences from Enstore. In addition to configuration tests of the application to observe how resource allocation works or to configure automatic tape provisioning, efforts have been made to deploy a centralized logging system to enhance the monitoring and...
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Nikita Balashov (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (RU))19/03/2024, 09:45
This
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presentation summarizes the current state of tape storage systems at
the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and gives our current
vision of its future in response to the discontinuation of Enstore
support. We provide a brief description of two of our currently
operating tape systems: a 90 PB instance built on dCache/Enstore and
an 11 PB instance based by EOS/CTA.... -
Viktor Kotliar (National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute (RU))19/03/2024, 10:00
This paper presents one of the possible architectures for a container-based CTA installation designed for a midsize storage system. The primary objective of this setup is to store archive data efficiently and integrate it with an existing computing cluster.
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Pablo Oliver Cortes (CERN), Vladimir Bahyl (CERN)19/03/2024, 10:15
The configuration of the CTA tape daemon was inherited from CASTOR, which relied on a manual process to create and store the configuration for each tape drive. As the scale of CERN's tape operations have grown to hundreds of drives, this approach has not scaled well. The CTA team have therefore developed a new semi-automated process to determine the configuration of each drive. The...
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Jorge Camarero Vera (CERN)19/03/2024, 11:00
Due to the upcoming end-of-life of CERN CentOS 7, CTA will be migrated to Alma Linux 9, following the recommendations of the CERN Linux team. Migrating the CTA codebase from CC7 to Alma 9 presented a range of compatibility hurdles. This talk will delve into the challenges encountered and the strategies used to overcome them, including: managing version changes in vital dependencies like...
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Joao Afonso (CERN)19/03/2024, 11:15
The original design of EOSCTA inherited its cache eviction mechanism — stagerrm — from CASTOR. Although similar, CTA's use-cases were not the same as CASTOR's, leading to several operational issues. This motivated the creation of a new command — evict — better adapted to modern disk buffer management in CTA.
In this talk, we will discuss the issues that we faced with stagerrm and how the...
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Joao Afonso (CERN)19/03/2024, 11:30
Recent improvements to CTA repack added several new features and tools for operators. However, we were still faced with severe performance issues when repacking tapes on a very large scale. An investigation showed that this was mostly due to limitations on the CTA SchedulerDB backend, which did not scale well to performing repack on the latest generation of very high capacity tapes, which can...
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Julien Leduc (CERN)19/03/2024, 11:45
The CTA software and service have been designed to match the Run-3 write performance requirements at WLCG Tier-0. The queuing system, coupled with a small SSD-based cache, has demonstrated its performance predictability over the first two years of the run.
This performance was achieved with FIFO scheduling, resulting in a pure temporal collocation on tapes, with only the legacy "storage...
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Michael Davis (CERN)19/03/2024, 12:00
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...
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Michael Davis (CERN)19/03/2024, 12:15
Final comments, questions and discussion.
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