File Systems and Access Technologies for the Large Scale Data Facility

Research projects produce huge amounts of data, which have to be stored and analyzed immediately after the acquisition. Storing and analyzing of high data rates are normally not possible within the detectors and can be worse if several detectors with similar data rates are used within a project. In order to store the data for analysis, it has to be transferred on an appropriate infrastructure, where it is accessible at any time and from different clients. The Large Scale Data Facility (LSDF), which is currently developed at KIT, is designed to fulfill the requirements of data intensive scientific experiments or applications. Currently, the LSDF consists of a testbed installation for evaluating different technologies. From a user point of view, the LSDF is a huge data sink, providing in the initial state 6 PB of storage, and will be accessible via a couple of interfaces. As a user is not interested in learning dozens of APIs for accessing data a generic API, the ADALAPI, has been designed, providing unique interfaces for the transparent access to the LSDF over different technologies. The present contribution evaluates technologies useable for the development of the LSDF to meet the requirements of various scientific projects. Also, the ADALAPI and the first GUI based on it are introduced.