MARS

Massive Archive and Restore System

The MARS deployment at SciNet is a combination of 3 software components, HPSS, HSI and HTAR, plus some customization done to our environment.

HPSS: the main component and the "blackbox" engine running in the background to support the Archive and Restore processes.

HSI: it may be best understood as a supercharged ftp interface, specially designed to act as a front-end for HPSS, gathering some of the best features you would encounter on a shell, rsync or GridFTP for example. In general terms it enables user to transfer whole directory trees from our most active file systems, therefore freeing up space in /project and /scratch. HSI is most suitable when those directory trees do not contain too many small files to start with, or when you already have a series of tarballs.

HTAR: similarly, htar is sort of a "super-tar" application, also specially designed to interact with HPSS, allowing users to auto-magically build, send or receive large .htar files to/from HPSS. HTAR is most suitable to aggregate directory trees many smaller files, provides that none of then exceed 68GB individually. The maximum size of any htar file should not exceed 1T either.