Berkeley Lab Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:
Friday, September 8, 2006
Time:
1:00pm-2:00pm
Location:
Building 50A-5132
Seminar Speaker:
Surya Pathak
Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~surya.d.pathak/index.htm
Title:
Logistical Storage (L-Store)
Abstract:
As the flood of data associated with leading edge instruments, sensors, and simulations continues to escalate, the challenge of supporting the distributed collaborations that depend on these huge flows becomes increasingly daunting. The chief obstacles to progress on this front lie less in the synchronous elements of the process, which have been reasonably well addressed by new global high performance networks, than in the asynchronous elements, where appropriate shared storage infrastructure seems to be lacking. To address this problem, the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) at Vanderbilt is developing a flexible storage framework called Logistical Storage (L-Store). L-Store is conceptually designed as a complete virtual file system. It uses the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP) as the underlying abstraction of distributed storage, will use Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) as a scalable mechanism for managing distributed metadata and software agent technology for implementing a distributed architecture. L-Store will provide rich functionalities in the form of role based authentication, automated resource discovery, mirroring and striping of data (fault tolerance), policy based data management, and transparent peer-to-peer interoperability of backend storage media. L-Store is agnostic to the underlying hardware and can be installed on simple personal computers having an internal disk or a full fledged hierarchical storage system (with tapes and disk backups). An SRM interface has been developed for the L-Store system allowing users to transparently read/write from/to an L-Store system using their existing SRM clients.
Sponsor of Seminar:
Arie Shoshani
Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov