IAS Seminar "The XSEDE Global Federated File System – Breaking Down Barriers to Secure Resource Sharing"

The GFFS offers scientists a simplified means through which they can interact with and share resources. Currently, many scientists struggle to exploit distributed infrastructures because they are complex, unreliable, and require the use of unfamiliar tools. For many scientists, such obstacles interfere with their research; for others, these obstacles render their research impossible. It is therefore essential to lower the barriers to using distributed infrastructures. The first principle of the GFFS is simplicity. Every researcher is familiar with the directory-based paradigm of interaction; the GFFS exploits this familiarity by providing a global shared namespace. The namespace appears to the user as files and directories so that the scientist can easily organize and interact with a variety of resources types. Resources can include compute clusters, running jobs, directory trees in local file systems, groups, as well as storage resources at geographically dispersed locations. Once mapped into the shared namespace, resources can be accessed by existing applications in a location-transparent fashion, i.e., as if they were local.

In this talk I will present the GFFS, its functionality, its motivation, as well as typical use cases. I will demonstrate many of its capabilities, including: 1) how to securely share data, storage, and computational resources with collaborators; 2) how to access data at the centers from campus and vice versa; 3) how to create shared compute queues with collaborators; and 4) how to create jobs and interact with them once started.

Anyone interested is cordially invited to participate in this seminar.