1. GSAF Grid Storage Access Framework
Salvatore Scifo
INFN sez. Catania
Tutorial per i Neo Assunti del Progetto PI2S2
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2. Partnership GSAF Resources
The GSAF Project is carried out by INFN - Catania with the cooperation of the IR&T engineering s.r.l. of Catania ( The context of this work is the TriGrid VL Project ( and the ADAT Project (“Archivio Digitale Antichi Testi).
Trigrid VL Project aims to port several Industrial Use Cases over the Grid Infrastructure and the ADAT Project wants to design and implement a Digital Archive for Cultural Heritage that adopts Grid as a Content Management System (CMS).
Resources
INFN
S. Scifo
IR&T engineering
V. Milazzo
A. Magrì
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3. CMS Content Management System
Content Management System is a system that allows user to manage dynamic content for several applications (web portal, digital libraries, …)
Main objectives
Manage Users
Manage Groups and Access Control Policies
Build and maintain dynamic web sites
Share documents among several organizations
Build application without specific technical knowledge
Organize and handle big amounts of information
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4. GRID GRID Computing GRID Storage
Grid computing : several and heterogeneous computational resource are combined together to solve problems which are not easy to solve with traditional system (also if computer clusters).
Grid Storage : several and heterogeneous storage devices and technologies are combined together to store and delivery several millions of data (Peta bytes order).
GRID Computing
GRID Storage
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5. GRID and CMS Storage Virtualization Security
unique and uniform interface to manage DATA provided by the grid middleware
unique and uniform interface to manage METADATA provided by the grid middleware
Large and numerous file hadling capability also in a geographic distributed environment
Ubiquity : data access independently bye their location
Security
Centralized access control mechanism based on x.509 certificates and user roles according to Virtual Organization policies that users belong to
Availability, Scalability, Fault Tolerance
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6. Grid Storage Access Framework
GSAF stands for Grid Storage Access Framework and it is a kind of Development Toolkit designed to help developers in building applications based on Grid Storage Services for managing files and data.
The most important requirement of the GSAF is to hide the complexity and the fragmentation of the several APIs provided by the gLite 3.0 middleware in order to interface the main three Grid Data Services : Storage Element (GFAL API), File Catalog (LCG-Utils API) and Metadata Catalog (AMGA API).
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7. Multi Layer Architecture
Main idea is designing an opened, multilayered and distributed architecture to provide interoperability among Data and Metadata Management services of the GRID infrastructure and several applications.
First Step: it is to produce both, the API and the User Application that validates it. In this case any application must be still developed according to a vertical architecture and it implies that the Application Server Machine (which hosts the application) must be equipped as a Grid User Interface.
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8. Deployment Plan
At the present moment, any application needs to be deployed within the Grid Site and, moreover, all applications could be developed in Java.
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9. GSAF AND APPLICATIONS Main framework capabilities are: Demonstrator
Uploading file to the SE, registering LFN to the LFC and saving metadata into AMGA in a coherent, atomic mode.
Browsing Metadata Catalogue to download file and/or access to attributes schemas and values.
Search file by Metadata to download file and/or access to attributes schemas and values.
Deleting file in atomic mode from SE, LFC and AMGA
Demonstrator
The application demonstrates the framework behaviour allowing Grid User to manage file and metadata remotely using a web user interface.
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10. Logical Architecture Schema
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11. File Upload
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12. File Download
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13. File Delete
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14. File Search
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15. File Browse
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16. Conclusions
Sharing information belonging to different organizations in secure, scalable and efficient way is very frequent and actual in the ICT environment.
GRID offers
Reliable Resources Organization
Distributed storage virtualization
Uniform data access
Security and data Preservation
GSAF means
Useful API to develop Storage based applications
Useful and simple web interface to access Data Management Services remotely
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