The xrootd System

Speaker: Andrew Hanushevsky

Date: Thursday, June 8, 2006
Time: 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Location: Orange Conference Room, Bldg 40
Goodies: Tea and cookies provided

Abstract:

When dealing with the concurrent access from a multitude of clients to petabyte-scale data repositories, high performance, low latency, fault tolerance, robustness, and scalability are very important issues. This work describes the architecture and the choices made in designing the xrootd file access system. The first goal of the system was to provide access to over 10⁷ files representing several petabytes of experimental physics data.

This talk describes the xrootd system and explains how performance was achieved. The system is currently used by BaBar at SLAC, IN2P3, INFN, FZK, and RAL. It is also used the Star at BNL and Alice at CERN. The xrootd system is included in the standard CERN root distribution.

About the Speaker:

Andrew Hanushevsky has worked for SLAC as a systems developer since 1996. Prior to this, he worked at Cornell University concentrating on Mass Storage Systems and distributed security. His current main focus is xrootd, as it applies to BaBar and the PetaCache project.