ARCO: A LONG-TERM DIGITAL LIBRARY STORAGE SYSTEM
BASED ON GRID COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Han Fei, Paulo Trezentos, Nuno Almeida, Miguel Lourenço
ADETTI, ISCTE, Portugal
Edificio ISCTE, Avenida das Forcas Armadas,1600-082 Lisboa, Portugall
José Borbinha, João Neves
National Library of Portugal
Campo Grande, 83-1749-081 Lisboa, Portugal
Keywords: Grid Computing, Digital Library, Storage, Large file transfer
Abstract: Over the past several years the large scale digital library service has undergone enormous popularity. Arco
project is a digital library storage project in Portuguese National library. To a digital library storage system
like ARCO system, there are several challenges, such as the availability of peta-scale storage, seamless
spanning of storage cluster, administration and utilization of distributed storage and computing resources,
safety and stability of data transfer, scalability of the whole system, automatic discovery and monitoring of
metadata, etc. Grid computing appears as an effective technology coupling geographically distributed
resources for solving large scale problems in the wide area or local area network. The ARCO system has
been developed on the Grid computational infrastructure, and on the basis of various other toolkits, such as
PostgreSQL, LDAP, and the Apache HTTP server. Main developing languages are C, PHP, and Perl. In this
paper, we discuss the logical structure sketch of the digital library ARCO system, resources organization,
metadata discovering and usage, the system's operation details and some operations examples, as also the
solution of large file transfer problem in Globus grid toolkit
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Back
ground of digital library
storage system
With the swift popularity of providing digital
content and multimedia service through internet,
traditional libraries are in a changing role. The data
services of a library provided through internet have
undergone fundamental changes not only in style,
but also in the quality and quantity of the data.
Previously, library network provision was serviced
by a single stand alone server. Daily network
connections were limited to data volumes of merely
several megabytes. But since then, things have
changed dramatically.
Nowadays, people are no longer content just to
br
owse and look up some book catalogues and
introductions; they want to read digitalized books
online, or download the book to convenient movable
devices, such as notebooks and handhold book
reading gadgets. Meanwhile this digital content are
in multi styles, such as text file, static images, and
media streams. However, inside the library, all
digitalized data need to be stored in devices with
huge amount of storage capacity. As a result,
administrative software and toolkits for utilizing
data storage resources inside the digital virtual
library become complex and difficult to develop and
uphold. In the storage system of a digital library,
data are transferred from one part of the library
storage space to another part constantly; new books
are digitalized and copied into the library system;
44
Fei H., Trezentos P., Almeida N., Lourenço M., Borbinha J. and Neves J. (2005).
ARCO: A LONG-TERM DIGITAL LIBRARY STORAGE SYSTEM BASED ON GRID COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE.
In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 44-51
DOI: 10.5220/0002534000440051
Copyright
c
SciTePress
old version are deleted or updated; metadata
catalogue need to be set up and updated continually.
BN (Biblioteca Nacional) is the Portuguese
national library. BN needs to combine leading
information processing techniques and undertake the
mission of digital publishing, provide digital books,
preserve cultural artefacts, and process metadata,
etc. As a result, it became an urgent demand to have
a system with a large storage capacity.
1.2 Storage system demand in BN
Each year, millions of users and clients, all over the
world, connect to BN through the internet and use
the online service provided. The service includes not
only simply looking up book catalogue and
browsing brief html files, but also online reading of
digital books and downloading of digital content for
late reading or rendering. All of these data need to
be digitally stored somewhere.
With the time passing by, the storage system
needs to be not only big enough for old data, but
also fully scalable in capacity for the future, because
almost every day, big amount of digital data is
produced (around 400 GB/day). The scale of the
needed storage capacity is petabytes. For the time
being, from the view point of mature and viable
technique solution, only some kind of storage cluster
or server farm can provide storage capacity in this
scale.
Nowadays, an entry-range server with a
powerful CPU and a large capacity is much cheaper
than several years ago (1-2 EURO / Gigabyte).
A dual CPU server with about 800-1200
Gigabytes hard drives (4 hard drives) turn out then
to be a proper choice for data storage system. With
all of these kinds of computers connecting with each
other, there is another challenge remaining unsolved.
How to build a system capable of use these
resources? The storage demand in BN is not only
just simple a matter of scale well, since the storage
devices and network connections are just the
primary basis of a digital library. Digital library still
need administrative software, toolkits and
middleware software. All of these items need to be
combined together into the functional virtual library.
The ARCO project in BN aims at leading edge
techniques and solutions, to develop a digital library
storage system with computational storage resources
and a set of software toolkits.
2 ARCO PROJECT OBJECTIVES
AND RELATED TECHNIQUES
2.1 Project objectives
Through the ARCO project, BN want a usable
storage system able to handle a huge amount (about
several hundreds of Tera Bytes) of digital content.
The ARCO system will be the main reservoir of
the digital library in BN. Internally, the storage
system need to be constructed based on a layered
concept, in order to get better use of already
available toolkits and techniques. Any developed
part of the system can be re-used in the future.
Under various considerations, the following points
have been proposed.
The physical basis of the system is a cluster of
PCs, without keyboard and monitor. In the
experiment and developing stage ARCO has 30 PCs
providing a storage capacity of 24 TB.
All these PCs are connected by 1Gigabit fast
Ethernet, but the software and the middle-ware will
not make any assumption to the speed of network
connection. Data sharing should be available
between different part of departments inside BN,
and between BN and other major libraries in other
areas.
To solve these issues, ARCO is based on GRID
architecture, because it introduced an abstraction
layer to handle with the distributed data storage
environment.
The topological structure of the logical digital
library will be scalable in several levels to satisfy
future demand.
The system administrative operation will be
provided in PHP scripted webpages. This is easy to
use and convenient to operate over a different locale
through network.
There are three interfaces having been defined
for operations taken on different logical entities
level. The first interface is provided through
webpage which is scripted in PHP. The second is
provided through command line in the grid
computing environment. The third is provided in
API (Application Programming Interface). The
command line and API interfaces can be re-used by
other projects in the future.
The ARCO system provides the grid
computational resource automatically discovering
feature. All the local resource and hardware
attributes are collected and stored in LDAP server
directory service, and late are queried through by
LDAP clients. The resource attributes can be used in
several ways, such as data and workload
automatically redistribution or resource usage
monitorization.
ARCO: A LONG-TERM DIGITAL LIBRARY STORAGE SYSTEM BASED ON GRID COMPUTATIONAL
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45
Metadata creation, querying, and administration
will be provided in ARCO system. Metadata are
stored in a PostgreSQL database.
ARCO system provides grid resource hardware
and network connection monitorization. For
example the CPU working environment is
discovered through ACPI interface, and some
working conditions are continuingly monitored.
To guarantee the system safety and information
integration, ARCO system adopts a basic security
mechanism, to authorize different administrators
with different level of rights to operate on various
logical entities of the library storage system.
All of these physical demands and logical
concepts have composed of the ARCO system. In
this paper we will discuss in details about the logical
structure of the system and some examples of
system operations.
2.2 Globus grid toolkits
Grid computing provides effective techniques for
coupling distributed resources, solving large-scale
computational and storage heavily problems over the
network. Globus grid toolkits(The Globus Project:
Globus Quick Start Guide)(IBM Redbook: Globus
Toolkit 3.0 Quick Start Guide), as a middle-ware,
manages and uses resources in local or wide area
network.
Globus grid toolkits includes mainly three
parts(Ian Foster and Carl kesselman, 1999)(Ian
Foster et al., 2002). The first is GRAM, the Globus
Resource Allocation Manager, which is a basic
service that provides capabilities to submit job from
one grid node to another node. GRAM unites
computational resources in grid environment, and
provides a common user interface so that you can
submit and administrate jobs on multiple machines
on the Grid fabric environment. Without the grid
interface, first you will meet with different security
login procedure in a hetero-environment; second you
need to copy the executable file to the destination
machine for later execution; third you will try to
start running the job on the remote machine; finally
you will need to collect and transfer the computing
results or any error message back to your local node.
GRAM not only unites computational resources, but
also unifies utilization interfaces. When you submit
a job, you can configure the job executing
environment (i.e. source data, result data, standard
output and standard error file) by RSL (Resource
Specification Language) language sentence.
The second main part of Globus grid toolkit is for
information services, which provides information
about grid resources. In Globus toolkit, such utilities
include the MDS (Monitoring and Discovery
Services)(The Globus Project: MDS 2.1 User’s
Guide). Without MDS service, you must to write a
script or program to collect, analyse, and transfer
resource attributes from all grid nodes back to your
local node. In the case of Linux, perhaps you need to
make a statistic report about proc directory in every
computer, and then transfer this statistic information
back to your local computer, and finally generalize a
report about all resources of the grid cluster. In a
grid environment, MDS periodically collect local
information and store it into LDAP directory server.
You only need to send a LDAP query, and then you
will get all these useful information.
The third key part of Globus is for data
management and transferring, which includes such
utilities as GridFTP and globus-url-copy. The
GridFTP and globus-url-copy provide multiple
protocol transferring; meanwhile use the same
unified security mechanism as other parts of Globus
grid toolkit.
3 ARCO SYSTEM STRUCTURE
Looking from different angle and standpoint, we
will get different impression to ARCO system.
3.1 Digital Library abstract structure
To get a better understand we can compare the
ARCO storage system with the traditional library. In
a traditional library, there are catalogue for looking
up books in an organized way; in ARCO there are
metadata catalogue (PostgreSQL database) to
provide a books list, which can be browsed and
looked up in several methods. In according to
different branch of subjects, the traditional library,
which can have a very big area for storing books,
have book shelves with specific subject label. Books
belonging to one subject will put onto shelves
belonging to this subject. The subject and
correspondent shelves can be organized in a
complex way of several classes.
Figure 1 is the ARCO system abstract structure.
Like the traditional library, ARCO library is
composed by multiple volumes. A volume is
Figure 1: ARCO system abstract structure
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composed by multiple grid nodes, which are servers
in computing grid environment. But one volume can
have a mirror volume to guarantee the information
integration. Beside of be a mirror of another volume,
a mirror volume is as functional the same as a
normal one.
A grid node is composed by multiple file
systems. Physically, file systems is a partition of a
hard drive, or occupy a whole hard drive, even span
over several hard drive in the case of soft RAID or
LVM. Finally, books are stored in file system.
But a node can be detached from the grid cluster
through a special operation, in which case, all the
data reside inside this node will be automatically
redistributed to other nodes of the same volume.
This is a way for guarantee the information
integration of the volume.
In traditional library, a book will have several
physical copies. In a digital library as ARCO, mirror
copy is needed, but only for the security and
information integration reason. The mirror in ARCO
is arranged on the volume level. A mirror volume is
organized in the same way as normal volumes, only
the metadata catalogue of the mirror volume has a
record item to say that this volume is a mirror of
which volume and the metadata catalogue of the
main volume will has a record to show the mirror
volume name.
3.2 System interface
Figure 2 demonstrate the layered structure of the
ARCO system user interface.
Looking from the outside, the ARCO system
provide three interfaces, which are http protocol web
interface, command line interface and API interface.
Through web interface users can query the system
information or take some operations. Under this
case, users are divided into different groups and
granted different right to take specific operations.
User need to login into the system, then all the
available commands and menus to this specific
security class will be appear in several web pages.
The web page is scripted in PHP and rendered by
Apache server. The login and security control is
also done by PHP scripts. Whenever any operation is
asked by the user, in fact, PHP scripts will call
command line interface to do the actual thing.
In ARCO system, command line interface takes
full control of the system. It utilizes the security
mechanism of operating system, database and
Globus grid to check the user's identification. The
web page interface provides only preconfigured
operations and functions, compared with this, the
command line interface are fully free to not only
preconfigured operations, but also to any operation
scripted on the fly. In the case of some special
operations that haven’t been configured, the
administrator can use command line interface, and
write a script (Shell, Perl, Python etc.) to do it. The
command line interface can be used in the future for
other project or system function expanding.
The API interface is the basis of all the system
operation. The entire high level interface will finally
call the API interface to fulfil the operation. The API
interface can work as a library tool that in the future
can be used by other programs.
3.3 User, Group and security
definition
The ARCO system will provide a large storage
capacity. Digitalized books and media data will
constantly flow into the system. From the viewpoint
of security, operators and users need to have
different level of authorities.
Figure 3 shows the ARCO system security
mechanism. There are two levels of security. In the
high level, ARCO system works as a storage
reservoir and the operations have been defined to
operate at this level. There are also many users and
administrators. What kind of operations can be taken
by which user must be strictly limited in a
preconfigured way? The high level security
mechanism guarantees the system safety and the
information integrity.
Figure 2: ARCO system multiple interface structure
Figure 3: ARCO system security structure
In a summary, the ARCO web interface has
adopted independent security mechanism which is
scripted in PHP and rendering by Apache server. But
the command line and API interface don't provide
ARCO: A LONG-TERM DIGITAL LIBRARY STORAGE SYSTEM BASED ON GRID COMPUTATIONAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
47
this kind of high level security mechanism, which
just assume that people get touch to this level will
have fully control over not only the hardware but
also the system services. The figure 4 is the ARCO
system security schema in the web interface. All the
ARCO system operations will finally step down into
APIs for some kinds of services and resources, and
then in here, it is the grid security mechanism takes
effects.
4 SYSTEM OPERATIONS
The ARCO system not only has some static features,
such as the system interfaces in various level and
zones of volumes and grid nodes and file systems,
but also has dynamic snapshots. Dynamically, new
works are constantly stored into the system,
ephemeral versions are replaced or deleted, new
subjects are created, subjects are merged or
reorganized, new servers are added into the grid,
servers are shutdown and moved out for maintaining
reason, accident are taken place in hardware level
and software level then fault recoveries are taken
place. Dynamic operations and static feature, in
together, compose the ARCO system.
Figure 5 shows the operation classes in ARCO
system. All the operations can be generally divided
into 2 groups, the first is information querying and
updating, and the second is data transferring related.
The objectives of dividing operations into classes
and groups are for a better and clearer logical
structure, and to get maximum code reuse.
In ARCO the metadata define in a detailed mode
the virtual digital library and parameters of the grid
infrastructure resources. All the data transferring
operations need first to know not only the usable
grid storage and computing resources, but also the
logical structure of the library. Metadata querying
provides a way to know the library logical structure,
which is the same as in traditional library, where the
librarian need to know where each bookshelf is and
what each bookshelf is labelled. Grid resource query
and update is the same concept as the librarian needs
to know the bookshelves usage and distribution
details in each catalogue section. Library structures
uphold is to reorganize the library. Book information
index and update provide the book catalogue.
Figure 4: ARCO system security schema
From high level such as a volume to low level
such as a single book, the data transferring
operations are divided into different groups. Some of
the data transferring operations will take long time,
operations as these are better to be arranged to
execute in batch mode. All transferring operations,
complex or simple, finally will be analysed and
divided into unit single file transfer. The single file
transfer unit are described in JDL (job description
language) and write down in a JDR (job description
record). In the case of short operation, the JDR will
be submitted to execute at once, and the result can
be got interactively. To a complex and time
consuming operation, all its JDRs of file transfer
units are stored in a JDR link list structure, which
can be write to a file in hard drive and late read
back. The JDR link list will be submitted to execute
in batch mode.
The JDR includes not only the digital library
metadata and library structure information, but also
grid resources details and job executing
configuration. The grid resources demand and job
executing configuration of the JDR are written in
grid RSL (Resource Specification Language).
4.1 Metadata about objects, job
description record and batch
mode
In ARCO system, metadata is mainly stored in
PostgreSQL database. The metadata information is
very important, which not only defines the logical
structure of the digital library, but also is the
Figure 5: System Operation Schema
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bookkeeping of the content storage. To take a simple
example, the metadata is just like the super block
and inodes and the journal database of a file system;
and the grid storage resource is like the storage
block of a file system. Almost all of the digital
library operation are tightly related with querying
and update the ARCO metadata.
volume: name, id, mirror, mirror-info, date,
username, status, log;
grid node: domain-name, ip, volume-id, status,
log;
file system: dynamically query from LDAP
directory;
book: name, id, size, grid-node-ip, full-path-
name, status, date, log;
4.2 Operation example: Insert new
book into ARCO system
Qualified operators with administrator rights can
insert new digital books or files into ARCO system.
When the operator submits an “insert new book” job
to ARCO system, some metadata item must be
clearly defined: (Inside quotation mark, we compare
it with traditional library operation).
- Book name (Book name in traditional library);
- Source server domain name, full path (Where
is the book);
- Volume id (Which catalogue section the book
belong to? i.e. Society or Law or Science.);
- Insert (This should be a new book).
Then the ARCO system will look up the
PostgreSQL database to make sure what grid nodes
are belong to this Volume and if there is another
mirror Volume:
- Grid nodes domain name list of this volume
(Bookshelves belong to this catalogue section);
- Grid nodes domain name list of mirror
volume.
Then we query the LDAP server in each Grid
node and get the basic information:
- All available file systems and free space (The
free space in available bookshelves);
Then make choice of one proper server and file
system according to specific policy, i.e. largest one
first, or the first available first. The next step is to
copy the file from the source entry point to the
destination. If this volume has mirror, the book will
also copy into the mirror volume. If the copy
operation is successful then insert the metadata into
the PostgreSQL database:
Book name, id, size, grid-node-ip, full-path-
name, status, date, log, and operator.
Books, which reside inside a volume, can be
indexed, looked up and browsed through web
services. Sometimes the operation is to insert a new
book, but there is already a book with the same
name in this volume. Under this case, the system
will send out warning message and do nothing.
There is a book update operation in ARCO for
update an old version. But the system allows the
storage of different book with the same name but in
different volumes.
4.3 Operation example: Volume copy
In ARCO system, many basic operations can
combine with each other to compose of complex
semantics structures and sentences. It is like in our
natural language, when we want to express ourselves
or generalize complex imagination, we always
construct our thinking by using basic idea unites. In
ARCO system, volumes don't share grid nodes, so
that a volume is logically and physically
independent with its copy. After copying, the
duplicated volume can be labelled as the mirror of
the main volume; otherwise, the volume copy
operation can just act as an intermedium step of
more complex operations.
A volume can be very large, it can include many
grid nodes, each node can have many file systems,
and each file system can have many books stored.
The volume copy operation is time consuming; it
can take very long time to finish, so we have
programmed its executing in batch mode.
The first step of volume copy is to query the node
name list of the destination volume, and then to each
grid node, send LDAP query and get file system
details and free space information about file
systems. The second step is to make a decision if the
total free space of the destination volume can hold
all the new files, after that, create a job description
record for each book. This record has enough
information, so that basic functions of insert a new
book operation can be reused in here. All the job
description records are stored in a link list structure,
the link list can be written to a file and late read back
from the file. The job link list is the basis of the
batch mode execution. After the file transferring
finished successfully, the final step is to update the
metadata information about the new volume and all
its books.
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49
4.4 Operation example: grid node
shutdown
The grid nodes are the physical basis of ARCO
storage system. One volume can have multi nodes.
Some times a node need to be shutdown and taken
out off the grid cluster, under this case, we still need
to keep all the data intact, so all books in the
shutdown node need to be transferred to other nodes
in the same volume.
Firstly, the gird node shutdown procedure need
to query and get the node name list of the same
volume, after that, send LDAP query and get all the
file system details and free space. Because the
shutdown procedure can cost very long time, the
entire book transferring jobs will be stored as a job
description record in a link list structure. Finally, the
operation will be submitted to execute in batch
mode.
5 BIG FILE TRANSFER PROBLEM
AND SOLUTION
Globus-url-copy (version 2.9 at the time of this
project) supports several transport protocols such as
GridFTP and GASS. It was designed to transfer
small files between grid nodes, but some of the files
in ARCO system are very big; usually they are
media stream files. In our test, GridFTP can not
transfer files bigger than 2 Gbytes.
Figure 6 shows how we have worked around the
big file transferring problem in Globus toolkit. For a
big file bigger than 2 Gbytes, firstly, we divide it
into smaller file parts with every single part bellow
the 2 Gbytes limitation; then, transfer each parts to
destination server; finally, join all the parts into a
full file.
In ARCO system, some digital books include
multi files and stay in a directory tree structure. In
theory, we can step down and traverse the directory
tree, meanwhile transfer each file and create
correspondent subdirectory in destination server, but
work in this way is dangerous, and can not keep the
information integration. Besides the big file transfer
problem, there are other small bugs in Globus
version 3.0 (see the release notes in
www.globus.org). So we have decided to treat book
of multi file or single file in the same way, to tar it
into file parts, then transfer file part, finally join file
parts. There is an excellent backup tool, Dar(Disk
ARchive software), which can backup files or
directories into several files of given size.
6 CONCLUSION
Now we have fulfilled the first phase of the ARCO
project. The original objective has been realized. For
the time being, the ARCO system running on about
30 PCs (dual CPU Pentium 2.4Ghz, 200G x 4 Hard
drives, 1G fast Ethernet, without monitor and
keyboard). The system has undergone some
experiment, such as new books copying into the
system, digital library structure re-constructing in
different level, security mechanism testing,
transferring large files (as large as 40 Gbytes), etc.
Grid technique has become the de facto solution
for combining and utilising geographically
distributed computing resources. In ARCO system,
we have utilized Globus grid toolkit, to provide a
integrated and unified storage system for the digital
library. For the time being, many other solutions still
need to be taken to overcome some limitations and
immature parts of the Globus grid toolkit.
From now on it will be much easier to BN store
and search for digitalized content, the system has a
good abstraction layer (provided by the Grid
services) and it’s very easy to increase the storage
capacity. The cost of this system is low, because it
uses desktop computers with IDE hard disks (less
than 500 € each) and in case of failure it’s always
possible to use the volume mirror.
Finally we can conclude that ARCO is a simple
and cheap solution to handle large TB of digital
content.
Figure 6: Big File Transfer
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ICEIS 2005 - DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
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