Speaker
Robert Petkus
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Description
The roles of centralized and distributed storage at the RHIC/USATLAS Computing
Facility have been undergoing a redefinition as the size and demands of computing
resources continues to expand. Traditional NFS solutions, while simple to deploy and
maintain, are marred by performance and scalability issues, whereas distributed
software solutions such as PROOF and rootd are application specific, non-posix
compliant, and do not present a unified namespace.
Hardware and software-based storage offer differing philosophies with respect to
administration, data access, and how I/O bottlenecks are resolved. Panasas, a
clustered, load-balanced storage appliance utilizing an object-based file system, has
been key in mitigating the problems inherent in NFS centralized storage. Conversely,
distributed software storage implementations such as dcache and xrootd have enabled
individual compute nodes to actively participate as a unified “file server”, thus
allowing one to reap the benefits of inexpensive hardware without sacrificing
performance.
This talk will focus on the architecture of these file servers, how they are being
utilized, and the specific issues each attempt to address. Furthermore, testing
methodologies and expectations will be discussed as they pertain to the evaluation of
new file servers.
Primary author
Robert Petkus
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Co-authors
Bruce Gibbard
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
David Free
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Jerome Lauret
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Maurice Askinazi
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Ofer Rind
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Thomas Throwe
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Yingzi Wu
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Zhenping Liu
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
