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A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

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Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#101
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I got a similar list in response to my link on Twitter https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1210858696558944256 But it looks like GridFTP and Globus are basically dead https://opensciencegrid.org/technology/policy/gridftp-gsi-mi... Tsunami sounds good but maybe needs some updating? I haven’t looked closely...

Globus is definitely not dead[1], it has an active community with strong uptake in the Materials Science world (where I work), among others. The Globus folks have a repo for many popular Linux distros, it's reasonably straightforward to get started. (I'm a user of it, not a developer or necessarily an advocate.) It's not free for "managed" (Enterprise) applications, though, which is what the OP seems to be looking fo…

I concur that Globus is definitely not dead! We're transferring 10s to 100s of TB per month with it. Globus is continuing to maintain GridFTP for this purpose, as part of Globus Connect Server and Globus Connect Personal, and it will happily saturate a multi-Gbps link.

And personally, I'd like to see more people getting a Globus subscription. It's cost-effective when compared to tools like Aspera, and helps fund the development of Globus software and features.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#102
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not familiar with it. It looks like you could build a good-enough file transfer system on top of UDT, but probably not with the rate control protocols they provide. One problem with UDP protocols over the open internet is that you cannot trust UDP packet contents, which could come from anywhere.

Step one: send a file that's cryptographically signed. Step two: the client solves the problem of "which of these duplicate and conflicting packets do I need to assemble together to make a message that is appropriately signed?"

I solved it by cryptographically signing each packet. The signature was checked before decrypting the packet.

Some customers (e.g. DOD) sent in clear, unsigned. They trusted their networks.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#103
post #44

Ex Aspera Dev here. I did the encryption and early parallel work. There is a lot of good science behind fasp. An advantage it has over IETF protocols is that both ends trust one another. Another advantage, until recently, was out-of-order delivery. The protocol totally ignores drops, for flow control. Instead, it measures change in transit time. The receiver knows, the sender needs to know, but the useful lifetime of…

Weren't a lot of these problems that whole reason for SCTP (Stream Control Transport Protocol) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP)?

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#104
Question at the meta-level: what software/platforms are producing, analyzing, modifying & consuming this data?

Is it possible some legacy systems that produce and consume these massive files on-site would more sensibly run in the cloud, directly & selectively accessing the data chunks they need over fast backbone connections?

Also, is there any room for an rsync type approach, sending compressed deltas rather than naively sending huge files that may be redundant?

Not to say disintermediating a BigCO expensive patented vendor-locked-in MLPOS (Market Leading Piece Of Shit) doesn't sound exciting -- it does. I'm just curious and a bit skeptical that it is always necessary to mass-copy all this data over and over.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#105
post #44

Ex Aspera Dev here. I did the encryption and early parallel work. There is a lot of good science behind fasp. An advantage it has over IETF protocols is that both ends trust one another. Another advantage, until recently, was out-of-order delivery. The protocol totally ignores drops, for flow control. Instead, it measures change in transit time. The receiver knows, the sender needs to know, but the useful lifetime of…

I'm curious how much the observed speed of Aspera on the Internet might rely on "nicer" protocols (TCP) backing off as Aspera causes congestion^H^H maximises link utilisation.

Do you think the protocol might cause problems if it were more widely used?

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#106
post #91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that typically takes government cooperation, and you still don't get better latency -- even if you have neutrinos.

what?

Certain labs were sending neutrinos right through the earth, gaining a measurable reduction in transit time vs great-circle overland signal propagation. (At first they thought they were gaining even more, by superluminal transit, but that turned out to illusory.)

They did not put any data in the neutrino channel, to my knowledge, but in principle they could have.

You might think you would need quite a deep chord to beat microwave propagation over the surface, because the dielectric coefficient of rock reduces the speed of light there. But that wouldn't affect neutrinos, which definitely go much faster through any kind of rock than light ever goes down a fiber. True fact.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something bittorrent could get better at. It would be cool to update the bittorent spec to use eg. a resnet to predict endpoint and path saturation from moment to moment. It's kind of amazing really that the near future will probably be about removing massive amounts of code & design from all sorts of incredibly carefully engineered systems like the linux kernel in favor of a pile of linear algebra that can j…

If you think the best answer to predicting things is to just throw a neural net at it, you should probably learn more control theory. :) (Less flippantly - neural nets are mainly for the case where you can't effectively do manual feature engineering because your inputs are too varied and complex, you don't particularly care about the mathematical properties or guarantees of the solution, and where you don't even real…

[deleted]

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#108

Question at the meta-level: what software/platforms are producing, analyzing, modifying & consuming this data? Is it possible some legacy systems that produce and consume these massive files on-site would more sensibly run in the cloud, directly & selectively accessing the data chunks they need over fast backbone connections? Also, is there any room for an rsync type approach, sending compressed deltas rather than na…

The systems that produce massive DNA sequence files are machines reading the sequences of actual physical DNA molecules. The cloud can't sequence DNA, as far as I know.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#109
post #17

This looks interesting as well as it's developed at CERN and uses plain tcp protocol https://github.com/fast-data-transfer/fdt

Second this. When we needed to deal with somewhat similar issues (quickly transfer multi-gigabyte archives over massively unreliable link) , we ended up with FDT ; it can be easily scripted , and transfers data between two hosts (without using a network of torrent peers) at that hosts' link speed. Used it to transfer builds between US and Russia, and Russia and China .

+1

Used fdt to transfer a 6TB archive out of AWS very smoothly at full speed.

Re: A Desperate Plea for a Free Software Alternative to Aspera (2018)

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bbcp doesn't work so well for some reason. Where I used to work we had a senior dev that claimed that he could just repurpose bbcp for this. Then he gave up and wrote something custom in c++. Then he rewrote it in go, but used (among other things) non-multithreadsafe primitives, then when asked to make it encrypted, he used epoll with tls (which is apparently not a thing in go? I don't know). I told him he should jus…

The other senior dev was pretty close. We support bbcp for transfers to/from some of our environments, but we don't do the tuning. Instead, we set things up to be as accessible as possible (jumbo frames enabled, minimum # of hops from the DTN to the border), and leave it to the user to set all the bbcp options.

Did I miss something or bbcp seems a bit abandoned to itself?
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