CHEP 2024:
Enhancing XRootD Load Balancing for High-Throughput transfers
To address the need for high transfer throughput for projects such as the LHC experiments, including the upcoming HL-LHC, it is important to make optimal and sustainable use of our available capacity. Load balancing algorithms play a crucial role in distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers, ensuring optimal resource utilization, preventing server overload, and enhancing performance and reliability. RAL has used At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), the UK's Tier-1 centre for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), we started with a DNS round robin then moved to XRootD's cluster management service component, which has an active load balancing algorithm to distribute traffic across 26 servers, but encountered its limitations when the system as a whole is under heavy load. We describe our attempted tuning of the configuration of the existing algorithm before describing proposing a new tunable tuneable, dynamic load-balancing algorithm balancer based on a weighted random selection algorithm.
Achieving 100Gb/s data rates with XRootD - Preparing for HL-HLC and SKA
To address the needs of forthcoming projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the HL-LHC, there is a critical demand for data transfer nodes (DTNs) capable of achieving 100Gb/s of data movement. This high throughput can be attained through combinations of increased concurrency of transfers and improvements in the speed of individual transfers. At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), the UK's Tier-1 centre for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, and initial site for the UK SKA Regional Centre (SRC), we have provisioned 100GbE XRootD servers in preparation for SKA operations. This presentation details the efforts undertaken to reach 100Gb/s data ingress and egress rates using the WebDAV protocol through XRootD endpoints, including the use of a novel XRootD plug-in designed to asses XRootD performance independently of physical storage backend. Results are presented for transfer tests against a CephFS storage backend under different configuration settings (e.g. via tunings to file layouts). We discuss the challenges encountered, bottlenecks identified, and insights gained, along with a description of the most effective solutions developed to date and areas of future activities.
Sustainability at the RAL Tier-1
CHEP 2023:
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