21–27 Mar 2009
Prague
Europe/Prague timezone

Enhancing GridFTP and GPFS performances using intelligent deployment

24 Mar 2009, 08:00
1h
Prague

Prague

Prague Congress Centre 5. května 65, 140 00 Prague 4, Czech Republic
Board: Tuesday 069
poster Hardware and Computing Fabrics Poster session

Speaker

Mrs Elisabetta Ronchieri (INFN CNAF)

Description

Many High Energy Physics experiments must share and transfer large volumes of data. Therefore, the maximization of data throughput is a key issue, requiring detailed analysis and setup optimization of the underlying infrastructure and services. In Grid computing, the data transfer protocol called GridFTP is widely used for efficiently transferring data in conjunction with various types of file systems. In this paper, we focus on the interaction and performance issues in a setup, which combines GridFTP server with the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), adopted for providing storage management and capable of handling petabytes of data and billions of files. A typical issue is the size of the data blocks read from disk used by the GridFTP server version 2.3, which can potentially impair the data transfer threshold achievable with an IBM GPFS data block. We propose an experimental deployment of GridFTP server characterized by being on a Scientific Linux Cern 4 (SLC4) 64-bit platform, having GridFTP server and IBM GPFS over a Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure aimed to improve data throughput and to serve distributed remote Grid sites. We present the results of data-transfer measurements, such as CPU load, network utilization, data read and write rates, obtained performing several tests at INFN Tier1 where the described deployment has been setup. During this activity, we have verified a significant improvement of the GridFTP performances (of almost 50%) on SLC4 64-bit over SAN saturating the Gigabit with a very low CPU load.

Primary author

Mrs Elisabetta Ronchieri (INFN CNAF)

Co-authors

Presentation materials