Speaker
Description
XRootD provides fast, low latency, and scalable data access. It also provides a hierarchical organization of a filesystem-like namespace organized as a directory. As part of CERN EOS, XRootD assures another possibility for a fast connection for data transfer between the client and the EOS FST.
This is the presentation of Comtrade's work at the CERN's project of productization of EOS, and it is the presentation of XRootD porting to Windows as a part of the EOS client porting from Linux to Windows. All functionalities of the EOS client ported on Windows should ultimately be the same as those on Linux. XRootD is a part of the EOS client implementation on Linux and the first approach is to port the XRootD to provide EOS implementation on Windows. To make the best use of all the advantages and possibilities of Windows, the transfer of XRootD to Windows is designed to support the functionalities of XRootD and not to transfer the original code from Linux to Windows.
XRootD implementation on Linux is technically investigated as a group of components to port EOS client functionalities from Linux to Windows adequately. The list of external libraries is presented for each of these components. Presented is the list of the majority of Linux libraries used in XRootD, where there are Windows alternatives. If the porting of the XRootD to Windows is limited to essential functionalities, the most important is the port of the xrdcp binary to Windows. Except for networking and security, appropriate libraries for Windows are available for all other functionalities.
According to the determined missing Windows libraries for network and security, network and security should be either implemented on Windows as part of xrdcp or we should provide a Windows version of these libraries. Within a collaboration between CERN openlab and Comtrade, Comtrade invested and provided a port of XRootD and xrdcp binary with no encoded connection (security). Based on Comtrade's estimation, the investment needed for porting missing XRootD libraries to Windows is out of the scope of Comtrade internal investments for XRootD. To complete this implementation, an appropriate outside investment is needed. The final result will be the complete port of the XRootD to Windows. Finally, porting XRootD to the Windows platform would bring additional possibilities for using Windows for particle physics experiments.
