CernVM-FS: Overview and Roadmap (EUM'21)
Channel: EasyBuild
Date: 25/01/2021

by Jakob Blomer (CERN, Switzerland) at the EUM'21 (https://easybuild.io/eum​).
For comments and questions, please use the #eum​ channel in the EasyBuild Slack, see https://easybuild.io/eum/#practical-info​ for details.

Delivering complex software across a worldwide distributed infrastructure of data centers and supercomputers is a major challenge in scientific computing. Copying the entire software stack everywhere it’s needed is often impractical and inefficient -- software stacks can grow very large, new versions are produced frequently, while any given job only needs a small fraction of the total software. To address application delivery at scale, CernVM-FS distributes software to hundreds of thousands of machines around the world in the form of a global, purpose-built shared software area. This presentation gives a technology overview and discusses use cases, experience from operations, and future plans.