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October 8, 2025Open Access

Evolution of the CERN Tape Archive Scheduling System

JGJ. GuentherNorthern Illinois University JAJoão AfonsoEuropean Organization for Nuclear Research RBRichard BachmannEuropean Organization for Nuclear Research

Key Points

The new analysis reveals strengths and weaknesses in the current CTA Scheduler's performance for FIFO queueing operations and limitations for non-FIFO tasks.
Non-FIFO operations such as delete and priority queue operations require workarounds, while FIFO queue operations are efficient.
The study discusses an alternative implementation based on relational database technology to address limitations of the current backend.
Constraints imposed by the existing backend affect the CTA Scheduler's code modifications and create additional software dependencies for developers.

Abstract

The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) scheduling system implements the workflow and lifecycle of archive, retrieve and repack requests. The transient metadata for queued requests is stored in the Scheduler backend store (Scheduler DB). In our previous work, we presented the CTA Scheduler together with an object-store backend implementation of the Scheduler DB. Now, with four years of experience in production, the strengths and limitations of this approach are better understood. While highly efficient for FIFO queueing operations (archive/retrieve), non-FIFO operations (delete, priority queues) require some workarounds. Additionally, this backend imposes constraints on how the CTA Scheduler code can be modified and is an additional software dependency and technology for developers to learn. This paper discusses an alternative Scheduler DB implementation, based on relational database technology. We include a status report and roadmap.

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