Storage

Note: Asset storage is not currently in production yet. (Last updated: 2021-08-04)

We can also define filesystems where we can store experiment data and artifacts. There is currently one type of storage (filesystems), with two types of longevity (storage lifetime): experiment and site. Experiment storage lives for the duration of the experiment, and site storage lives for the lifetime of a site. These will be explained further in later sections, but for now, let us look at an example of creating an experiment using storage in our experiment description.

Complete Example

import mergexp as mx

from mergexp.unit import gb

# create a topology named storage

net = mx.Topology('storage')

# create a definition for a filesystem (fs) storage with a 10GB quota

siteAsset = mx.Storage(kind="fs", size=gb(10), name="staticAsset")

# create three nodes: a, b, and c and connect them on a LAN

nodes = [net.device(name) for name in ['a', 'b', 'c']]

lan = net.connect(nodes)

# statically assign each node with an ip address

for i,e in enumerate(lan.endpoints, 1):

e.ip.addrs = ['10.0.0.%d/24' % i]

# mount our filesystem on each node under /mnt directory

# mount takes 2 arguments: where to mount, and the object to mount

for node in nodes:

node.mount("/mnt/%s" % siteAsset.name, siteAsset)

mx.experiment(net)

There are two important parts of this code. First is creating an asset:

siteAsset = mx.Storage(kind="fs", size=gb(10), name="staticAsset")

Here we define an xir.Storage resource of type fs (filesystem), a quota of 10gb, and a name of staticAsset. That name is what will be referenced when using the cli to get the details of the asset.

The second integral piece is that we need to tell the xir that while we've create this asset, that we would like this asset to be apart of our experiment, and for that we need to invoke mount:

node.mount("/mnt/%s" % siteAsset.name, siteAsset)

Mount, tells the xir, that this asset will be attached to a node in our experiment. The first input to mount is the path to mount on the node, in the exmaple above it would be /mnt/[a,b,c] depending on the node, and the asset itself. You can mount multiple assets to a node.