Fermilab will move to CTA this spring with dCache as the frontend file system. The modifications made to CTA to be able to read Enstore (Fermilab's legacy tape management software) files will be discussed, as will our solution to read the existing Enstore Small File Aggregation (SFA) files.
Operational issues arising during our push to production will be highlighted. Details on our...
We will share our experiences and challenges with using CTA last year. We optimized the CTA configuration and upgraded the EOS&CTA. Additionally, we expanded the scale of two experimental applications, Tier 1 of LHCB and HEPS, and enhanced the monitoring of the CTA system.
Operating the CERN Tape Archive all year-round does not come without surprises and challenges: massive recall campaigns, peak system throughput for archival during the data tacking period and (not so) transparent upgrades to critical services we depend on push the system to the limits, popping some nuts and bolts from time to time.
In this presentation, we will share insights gained from...
CTA was designed with two goals in mind: throughput to and from the tape system and minimising the stress on the tape infrastructure (minimising the number of tape mounts). These two constraints become particularly challenging in retrieval dataflows when elements external to the system start to misbehave.
In this presentation, we will explore the internal logic behind CTA’s retrieval...
The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) scheduling system manages the workflow of archive, retrieve, and repack requests, relying on a Scheduler database (Scheduler DB) for transient metadata storage. We present the development of a new relational database (PostgreSQL) backend for the Scheduler DB. The aim is to improve the limitations of the current (object-store based) implementation. This talk will...
For six years Scaleway offered S3 Glacier-class storage fully operated on mostly powered-off SMR disks.
This enabled us to offer our customers fast restore time while remaining cost effective, using a mix of commodity and custom hardware.
As our S3 service grew, and since we cannot control nor predict public cloud workloads, the former glacier stack was unable to keep up while becoming...
The Tapeguy is TRIUMF's home build tape system for ATLAS T1 data center, It was designed to be a stable system that can reliably store and retrieve LHC produced data as a tiered HSM system. we also open to other solutions, evaluated CERN CTA at site in 2024. the talk will present current tapeguy status, recent updates, and the evaluation done at site.
This talk is a follow-up from the 2024 BoF session on Offsite Tape Backup between sites. We will present the proof-of-concept architecture that we plan to develop in 2025. We propose to test it with one collaborating Tier-1 site (yet to be identified).
In 2024, the CTA Tape Daemon was updated to address issues in deployments with multiple drives per tape server. This was a first step towards a major refactoring of the daemon, as in its current state, its multi-process architecture presents problems such as logging information unrelated to the current process and inter-process communication bugs. It also causes confusion in internal...
