TobysSRB

SRB background

Within the eMinerals project, we use the San Diego Supercomputing Centre's SRB (Storage Resource Broker) as our primary data storage facility.

A full description of the SRB may be found at the http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/. Briefly, however, the SRB offers a unified interface to a distributed data storage backend. Data is stored on a number of "vaults" which may live anywhere on the Internet. However, this is hidden from the SRB user, who just sees a normal filesystem interface, independent of the files' locations.

Thus, the SRB file:

/home/user.eminerals/results_file

may actually reside in any one of the project's vaults, which are distributed across several countries.

SRB interfaces: TobysSRB

SDSC supply a number of user interfaces to the SRB, including the unix lin-commands Scommands, the windows InQ tool, and the MySRB web interface. So why another tool? Well, unfortunately we found none of the existing tools fit our requirements exactly, so we have written a new web-based interface. This is called TobysSRB.

TobysSRB has a number of key features:

1. It is lightweight, meeting the needs of most of our users without giving many unused options.
2. Uploading and downloading files are easier and more intuitive operations.
3. File permissions are easily reset.
4. XML files can be rendered as xthml documents using our ccViz tool.
5. SVG files can be displayed automatically.

A TobysSRB instance interfacing to our test SRB server may be found and browsed at https://holbein.escience.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/TobysSRB/index.cgi. If no username or password is entered, you have access as a guest user.

The code for TobysSRB itself is freely available, and may be retrieved from [link]. If you find it useful, it is easily installable for your own SRB. Installation instructions and documentation are included in the downloaded package.

General references

Papers that describe TobysSRB can be obtained as pdf downloads from the following links:

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