Speaker
Dr
Horst Göringer
(GSI)
Description
GSI in Darmstadt (Germany) is a center for heavy ion research. It hosts an
Alice Tier2 center and is the home of the future FAIR facility. The planned
data rates of the largest FAIR experiments, CBM and Panda, will be similar to
those of the current LHC experiments at Cern.
gStore is a hierarchical storage system with unique name space and successfully
in operation since more than fifteen years. Its core consists of several tape
libraries and currently ~20 data mover nodes connected within a SAN network.
The gStore clients transfer data via fast socket connections from/to the disk
cache of the data movers (~240 TByte currently). Each data mover has also a high
speed connection to the GSI lustre file system (~3 PByte data capacity
currently). The overall bandwidth between gStore (disk cache or tape) and lustre
amounts to 6 GByte/s and will be duplicated in 2012. In the near future the
lustre HSM functionality will be implemented with gStore.
Each tape drive is accessible from any data mover, fully transparent to the
users. The tapes and libraries are managed by commercial software (IBM Tivoli
Storage Manager TSM), whereas the disk cache management and the TSM and user
interfaces are provided by GSI software. This provides the flexibility needed
to tailor gStore according to the always developing requirements of the GSI and
FAIR user communities. For Alice users all gStore data are worldwide accessible
via Alice grid software.
Data streams from running experiments at GSI u(p to 500 MByte/s) are written
via sockets from the event builders to gStore write cache for migration to tape.
In parallel the data are also copied to lustre for online evaluation and
monitoring.
As all features related to tapes and libraries are handled by TSM gStore is
practically completely hardware independent. Additionally, according to the
design principles gStore is fully scalable in data capacity and I/O bandwidth.
Therefore we are optimistic to fulfill also the dramatically increased mass
storage requirements of the FAIR experiments in 2018, which will be some orders
of magnitude higher than those of today.
Author
Dr
Horst Göringer
(GSI)
Co-authors
Mr
Matthias Feyerabend
(GSI)
Serguei Sedykh
(Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung mbH (GSI))
