Xrootd notes

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Businessy intro:

The XROOTD project aims at giving high performance, scalable fault tolerant access to data repositories of many kinds. The typical usage is to give access to file-based ones. It is based on a scalable architecture, a communication protocol, and a set of plugins and tools based on those. The freedom to configure it and to make it scale (for size and performance) allows the deployment of data access clusters of virtually any size, which can include sophisticated features, like authentication/authorization, integrations with other systems, WAN data distribution, etc.

XRootD software framework is a fully generic suite for fast, low latency and scalable data access, which can serve natively any kind of data, organized as a hierarchical filesystem-like namespace, based on the concept of directory. As a general rule, particular emphasis has been put in the quality of the core software parts.

Tech-type intro:

• xrootd is a file server, POSIX-like, and byte level access

(named for the ROOT Data analysis Framework), but file-agnostic

pluggable, meaning you can use it as an API, backed by what you want

allows multiple operations per requests (lower latency)

• seems mostly used in cluster settings

See also:

• http://xrootd.org/papers/Scalla-Intro.pdf
• http://xrootd.org/