Commodity hardware and open source solutions in FTU data management

Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) data management system underwent several developments in the last year, mainly due to the availability of huge amount of open source software and cheap commodity hardware. First of all, we replaced the old and expensive four SUN/SOLARIS servers running AFS (Andrew File System) fusione.it cell with three SuperServer Supermicro SC-742. Secondly Linux 2.4 OS has been installed on our new cell servers and OpenAFS 1.2.8 open source distributed file system has replaced the commercial IBM/Transarc AFS. A pioneering solution—SGI’s XFS file system for Linux—has been adopted to format one terabyte of FTU storage system on which the AFS volumes are based. Benchmark tests have shown the good performances of XFS compared to the classical ext3 Linux file system. Third, the data access software has been ported to Linux, together with the interfaces to Matlab and IDL, as well as the locally developed data display utility, SHOX. Finally a new Object-Oriented Data Model (OODM) has been developed for FTU shots data to build and maintain a FTU data warehouse (DW). FTU OODM has been developed using ROOT, an object oriented data analysis framework well-known in high energy physics. Since large volumes of data are involved, a parallel data extraction process, developed in the ROOT framework, has been implemented taking advantage of the AFS distributed environment of FTU computing system.