Allison AndrewsNERSC Storage Systems Group

Oakland Scientific FacilitySept. 10, 2014

Automated provisioning in NGF with NIM

Background

• NGF general purpose storage resources(routinely available to nersc users and projects)– Home Directories(/global/homes/<initial>/<user>)– Scratch Directories (/global/scratch2/sd/<user>)– Project Directories (/project/projectdirs/<proj>)– JGI scratch directories (/global/projectb/scratch/<user>)– JGI project directories (/global/dna/projectdirs/<jgi program>/<proj>)– Give-take directories (/global/scratch/gt/<user>)

• NGF Special purpose storage resources(available only by special arrangement)– “Common” directories for shared software– “Syscommon” filesystems for system management related storage– Other special purpose storage such as the seqfs filesystem used by jgi gene

sequencing machines– JGI sandbox directories (/global/projectb/sandbox/<jgi group>)

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Background

• home and scratch space is provisioned automatically from NIM• Project directories, and special storage resources were

provisioned manually• Increasing project dir requests, and default project directories

for every new project drive the automation of project directory provisioning

• NIM did not have mechanisms for representing storage resources like projectdirs, or project specific user dirs such as /global/projectb/scratch directories

• NIM did not have a mechanism to manage quota data, and transmit changes to resource providers(NGF).

• SSG, and the NIM team began a joint project to enhance NIM, and automate NGF provisioning tasks.

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Where we are today

• NIM changes propagate to NGF every 10 minutes• Project directories created automatically(/project,

but not /global/projectb, etc.)• Automatic updates of– Project directories owner(UID & GID) (root directory only,

this is not recursive)– Project directory quotas– Home quotas– Scratch quotas

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What lies ahead

• Replace userdir finger with the new NIM<->NGF automation framework

• Add support for other general purpose NGF resources– /global/dna/projectdirs/<jgi program>/<proj>– /global/projectb/scratch/<user>– /global/scratch/gt/<user>– /your/next/filesystem

• Add functionality to archive user home directories, and project directories

• Add tool to periodically verify that NGF is correctly provisioned according to the data in NIM

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What is not in plan

• Automatic provisioning of common, and other specialized file systems.

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Thank you.

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