Speakers
Describe the added value of the grid for your activity, or the value your tool or service adds for other grid users. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community, and the relevance for other scientific or business applications.
High performance disk-storage solutions based on parallel file systems are becoming increasingly important to fulfil the large I/O throughput required by High-Energy Physics applications. Storage Area Networks (SAN) are commonly employed at the Large Hadron Collider data centres, and SAN-oriented parallel file systems such as GPFS and Lustre provide high scalability and availability by aggregating many data volumes served by multiple disk servers into a single POSIX file system hierarchy. Since these file systems do not come with a Storage Resource Manager (SRM) interface, necessary to access and manage data resources in a Grid environment, we propose StoRM as a solution to provide the necessary capabilities to expose and integrate the storage resource available.
StoRM is currently adopted in the context of the LHC computing grid infrastructure and by the Economics and Finance community, as represented by the EGRID Project.
Report on the impact of the activity, tool or service. This should include a description of how grid technology enabled or enhanced the result, or how you have enabled or enhanced the infrastructure for other users.
StoRM leverages the advantages resulting from cluster approach in a Grid environment, enabling data intensive applications to access Grid data on a file system directly via POSIX calls. In this way the applications, whether scheduled via Grid or only through the local batch system, can access data in a transparent way with the guarantee to find the required disk space and without interact with any other transfer services.
The capability of StoRM to support this new data access pattern as well as other common Grid access protocols, as GridFTP or RFIO, will drive Grid applications towards a new approach on an extensive and high-performing use of storage resources.
Describe the activity, tool or service using or enhancing the EGEE infrastructure or results. A high-level description is needed here (Neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references is required).
StoRM (STOrage Resource Manager) is a flexible and high-performing implementation of the Storage Resource Manager (SRM) standard interface version 2.2. It is designed to takes advantages from storage systems based on cluster file system such as GPFS from IBM and Lustre from Sun Microsystems.
A modular architecture decouples StoRM logic from the different file system supported therefore it can be easily adapted to different underlying storage system via a plug-in mechanism.
