CERNBox: the CERN cloud storage hub

Labrador, Hugo González; Αλεξανδρόπουλος, Γεώργιος; Bocchi, Enrico; Castro, Diogo; Chan, Belinda; Contescu, Cristian I.; Lamanna, M.; Presti, Giuseppe Lo; Mascetti, Luca; Mościcki, J.; Musset, P.; Karavakis, E.; Pelletier, Remy; Valverde, Roberto

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201921404038

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…CERNBox [10][11][12] is the ubiquitous CERN cloud storage hub and collaboration platform. The service allows the whole CERN community to synchronize and share files on all major desktop and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android, iOS) providing universal access and offline availability to any data stored in the CERN EOS infrastructure (currently for users and projects, 7.5 petabytes and more than 1 billion files).…”

Section: Cernbox: Cern Cloud Collaboration Hubmentioning

confidence: 99%

CERN Disk Storage Services: Report from last data taking, evolution and future outlook towards Exabyte-scale storage

et al. 2020

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The CERN IT Storage group operates multiple distributed storage systems to support all CERN data storage requirements: the physics data generated by LHC and non-LHC experiments; object and file storage for infrastructure services; block storage for the CERN cloud system; filesystems for general use and specialized HPC clusters; content distribution filesystem for software distribution and condition databases; and sync&share cloud storage for end-user files. The total integrated capacity of these systems exceeds 0.6 Exabyte. Large-scale experiment data taking has been supported by EOS and CASTOR for the last 10+ years. Particular highlights for 2018 include the special HeavyIon run which was the last part of the LHC Run2 Programme: the IT storage systems sustained over 10GB/s to flawlessly collect and archive more than 13 PB of data in a single month. While the tape archival continues to be handled by CASTOR, the effort to migrate the current experiment workflows to the new CERN Tape Archive system (CTA) is underway. Ceph infrastructure has operated for more than 5 years to provide block storage to CERN IT private OpenStack cloud, a shared filesystem (CephFS) to HPC clusters and NFS storage to replace commercial Filers. S3 service was introduced in 2018, following increased user requirements for S3-compatible object storage from physics experiments and IT use-cases. Since its introduction in 2014N, CERNBox has become a ubiquitous cloud storage interface for all CERN user groups: physicists, engineers and administration. CERNBox provides easy access to multi-petabyte data stores from a multitude of mobile and desktop devices and all mainstream, modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS). CERNBox provides synchronized storage for end-user’s devices as well as easy sharing for individual users and e-groups. CERNBox has also become a storage platform to host online applications to process the data such as SWAN (Service for Web-based Analysis) as well as file editors such as Collabora Online, Only Office, Draw.IO and more. An increasing number of online applications in the Windows infrastructure uses CIFS/SMB access to CERNBox files. CVMFS provides software repositories for all experiments across the WLCG infrastructure and has recently been optimized to efficiently handle nightlybuilds. While AFS continues to provide general-purpose filesystem for internal CERN users, especially as $HOME login area on central computing infrastructure, the migration of project and web spaces has significantly advanced. In this paper, we report on the experiences from the last year of LHC RUN2 data taking and evolution of our services in the past year.. We will highlight upcoming changes and future improvements and challenges.

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Section: Cernbox: Cern Cloud Collaboration Hubmentioning

confidence: 99%

CERN Disk Storage Services: Report from last data taking, evolution and future outlook towards Exabyte-scale storage

et al. 2020

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“…In most cases, users prepare their simulation in their Windows PC where Ansys, COM-SOL or CST applications are available. The input files are then copied via the CERNbox [14] application to the EOS [15] storage system at CERN, which is our disk based storage system and where we recommend users to store large input and output files. Users then connect via an ssh client (generally Putty) to the LXPLUS interactive Linux cluster where the AFS file system is locally mounted.…”

Section: Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migrating Engineering Windows HPC applications to Linux HTCondor and Slurm Clusters

et al. 2020

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The CERN IT department has been maintaining different High Performance Computing (HPC) services over the past five years. While the bulk of computing facilities at CERN are running under Linux, a Windows cluster was dedicated for engineering simulations and analysis related to accelerator technology development. The Windows cluster consisted of machines with powerful CPUs, big memory, and a low-latency interconnect. The Linux cluster resources are accessible through HTCondor, and are used for general purpose parallel but single-node type jobs, providing computing power to the CERN experiments and departments for tasks such as physics event reconstruction, data analysis, and simulation. For HPC workloads that require multi-node parallel environments for Message Passing Interface (MPI) based programs, there is another Linux-based HPC service that is comprised of several clusters running under the Slurm batch system, and consist of powerful hardware with low-latency interconnects. In 2018, it was decided to consolidate compute intensive jobs in Linux to make a better use of the existing resources. Moreover, this was also in line with CERN IT strategy to reduce its dependencies on Microsoft products. This paper focuses on the migration of Ansys [1], COMSOL [2] and CST [3] users from Windows HPC to Linux clusters. Ansys, COMSOL and CST are three engineering applications used at CERN for different domains, like multiphysics simulations and electromagnetic field problems. Users of these applications are in different departments, with different needs and levels of expertise. In most cases, the users have no prior knowledge of Linux. The paper will present the technical strategy to allow the engineering users to submit their simulations to the appropriate Linux cluster, depending on their simulation requirements. We also describe the technical solution to integrate their Windows workstations in order from them to be able to submit to Linux clusters. Finally, we discuss the challenges and lessons learnt during the migration.

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“…At CERN, the Storage Group provides daily backups for all data stored in CERNBox [1][2][3]. The existing event-driven backup system has been running successfully since years but the lack of features (not snapshot based, not automatic verification, not resilient against disaster scenarios,...) and operational costs triggered the kick-start of a new project in 2019 to rethink our backup strategy towards a more feature-rich (snapshot based, scalable, backup verification, different geographical location,...) and cost effective solution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing a billion-entries multi-petabyte distributed file system backup problem with cback: from files to objects

Cameselle

Labrador

2021

EPJ Web Conf.

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CERNBox is the cloud collaboration hub at CERN. The service has more than 37,000 user accounts. The backup of user and project spaces data is critical for the service. The underlying storage system hosts over a billion files which amount to 12PB of storage distributed over thousands of disks with a tworeplica layout. Performing a backup operation over this vast amount of data and number of files is a non-trivial task. The original CERNBox backup system (an in-house event-driven file-level system) has been reconsidered and replaced by a new distributed and scalable backup infrastructure based on the open source tool RESTIC. The new system, codenamed cback, provides features needed in the HEP community to guarantee data safety and smooth operation from the system administrators. Daily snapshot-based backups of all our user and project areas along with automatic verification and restores are possible with this the new development. The backup data is also de-duplicated in blocks and stored as objects in a disk-based S3 cluster in another geographical location on the CERN campus, reducing storage costs and protecting critical data from major catastrophic events. We report on the design and operational experience of running the system and future improvement possibilities.

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CERNBox: the CERN cloud storage hub

Cited by 8 publications

References 4 publications

CERN Disk Storage Services: Report from last data taking, evolution and future outlook towards Exabyte-scale storage

CERN Disk Storage Services: Report from last data taking, evolution and future outlook towards Exabyte-scale storage

Migrating Engineering Windows HPC applications to Linux HTCondor and Slurm Clusters

Addressing a billion-entries multi-petabyte distributed file system backup problem with cback: from files to objects

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