CERNBox: the CERN cloud storage hub

Hugo González Labrador,Cristian Contescu,Massimo Lamanna,Belinda Chan,Luca Mascetti,Edward Karavakis,Enrico Bocchi,Diogo Castro,Georgios Alexandropoulos,Paul Musset,Jakub Moscicki,Roberto Valverde,Giuseppe Lo Presti,Remy Pelletier

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201921404038

Hugo González Labrador, Cristian Contescu + Show 12 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921404038

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Abstract

CERNBox is the CERN cloud storage hub. It allows synchronizing and sharing files on all major desktop and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android, iOS) aiming to provide universal access and offline availability to any data stored in the CERN EOS infrastructure. With more than 16000 users registered in the system, CERNBox has responded to the high demand in our diverse community to an easily and accessible cloud storage solution that also provides integration with other CERN services for big science: visualization tools, interactive data analysis and real-time collaborative editing. Collaborative authoring of documents is now becoming standard practice with public cloud services, and within CERNBox we are looking into several options: from the collaborative editing of shared office documents with different solutions (Microsoft, OnlyOffice, Collabora) to integrating mark-down as well as LaTeX editors, to exploring the evolution of Jupyter Notebooks towards collaborative editing, where the latter leverages on the existing SWAN Physics analysis service. We report on our experience managing this technology and applicable use-cases, also in a broader scientific and research context and its future evolution with highlights on the current development status and future road map. In particular we will highlight the future move to an architecture based on micro services to easily adapt and evolve the service to the technology and usage evolution, notably to unify CERN home directory services.

Highlights

The CERN IT Storage group is responsible for ensuring a coherent development and operation of the storage services at CERN for all aspects of physics data
CERNBox[3][4] is a project initiative launched by the IT Storage Group in 2014 to address the necessity of offering an easy and convenient way to access and share the physics data
The core of CERNBox is a synchronization and sharing system based on components provided by the ownCloud[1] open source software stack

Summary

Introduction

The CERN IT Storage group is responsible for ensuring a coherent development and operation of the storage services at CERN for all aspects of physics data. EOS allows CERNBox to store all the data and metadata from the users and provide a performant access to it. FUSE access: the storage can be mounted as a local file-system This is very important for computers inside the computer centre that do not have graphical interfaces but perform batch job processing. Users can work on their devices without connectivity and the synchronization client reconciles changes when the network connectivity is restored This component is the one that enables access to offline data with eventual consistency. The platform allows users for easy sharing between colleagues and external collaborators This feature of the service is being used extensively (as shown in Figure 3) and shows the potential of CERNBox to continue expanding its capabilities towards a collaborative hub. Section 3.2) and being the home directory service for all CERN users (see Section 3.3)

Scaling-up storage

Collaborative platform

Conclusion