Distributing the iRODS Catalog: A Way Forward
June 13-15, 2017
iRODS User Group Meeting 2017
Utrecht, Netherlands
Terrell Russell, Ph.D.
@terrellrussell
Interim Chief Technologist, iRODS Consortium
Distributing the iRODS Catalog: A Way Forward
A Limitation
An iRODS Zone has traditionally been deployed in a relatively local physical environment.
- Perhaps within a single rack
- Perhaps within a single data center
- Perhaps within a single city
- Perhaps within a single country
Longer distances (higher latency) has been solved via Zone Federation.
A New Use Case
In the last few years, researchers in academia and in both governmental and corporate sectors have become more interested in spanning greater physical distances within a single namespace (iRODS Zone).
However, connecting to a distant Catalog Provider is a significant, if not unbearable, hurdle.
Clustered iCAT
We have connected iRODS to a MariaDB Galera Cluster to provide a multi-master, distributed iRODS catalog.
Provides:
- local authentication and query
- improved metadata read performance
- locality of reference for data at rest
Clustered iCAT
Working Code
Future Work
- Testing on real networks over distance
- Testing targeted edge cases
- Testing other database technologies
- Updating iRODS Core and/or plugins
Team
Michael Stealey, Terrell Russell, Jason Coposky, Claris Castillo, Ray Idaszak, Benjamin Keller (RENCI at UNC-Chapel Hill)
Alex Feltus (Clemson University)
UGM 2017 - Distributing the iRODS Catalog: A Way Forward
By iRODS Consortium
