Analysis on the performance of CVMFS in KISTI-GSDC ALICE system

Abstract

The CernVM file system (CVMFS) provides a scalable, reliable and low-maintenance software distribution service. It was developed to assist High Energy Physics (HEP) collaborations to deploy software on the worldwide-distributed computing infrastructure used to run data processing applications. CernVM-FS is a member of CernVM family. CernVM is a Virtual Software Appliance capable of running physics applications from the LHC experiments at CERN. CernVM-FS focuses specifically on the software use case. Software usually comprises many small files that are frequently opened and read as a whole. Furthermore, the software use case includes frequent look-ups for files in multiple directories when search paths are examined. The experiment software is delivered to the machine just in time by means of network file system specifically designed for efficient software distribution. CernVM-FS is actively used by small and large HEP collaborations. In many cases, it replaces package managers and shared software areas on cluster file systems as means to distribute the software used to process experiment data. In this paper, I briefly explained how to install the CVMFS and compare performance of CVMFS to performance of torrent method in KISTI-GSDC ALICE system.