Speaker
Description
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is home to the world's largest particle accelerator (Large Hadron Collider, LHC) that produces massive amounts of data each year. CERN's Storage and Data Management Group is responsible for enabling data storage and access for the CERN laboratory, in particular the long-term archival, preservation and distribution of LHC data to a worldwide scientific community (WLCG).
The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) software manages more than an exabyte of data across 7 tape libraries and roughly 70.000 tapes. To sustain write throughputs of tens of gigabytes per second, a flash-based disk buffer sits in front of CTA, allowing tape drives to write at near peak efficiency.
This high-efficiency archival service runs on open-source software and is deployed on-premises using commodity hardware. This talk will give a high-level overview of CTA, its deployment at CERN and the various design principles enabling its high performance.
