PelicanFS

Overview

PelicanFS is a file system interface (fsspec) for the Pelican Platform. For more information about pelican, see our main website or Github page. For more information about fsspec, visit the filesystem-spec page.

Limitations

PelicanFS is built on top of the http fsspec implementation. As such, any functionality that isn’t available in the http implementation is also not available in PelicanFS.

Installation

To install pelican, run:

pip install pelicanfs

To install from source, run:

git clone https://github.com/PelicanPlatform/pelicanfs.git
cd pelicanfs
pip install -e .

Using PelicanFS

To use pelicanfs, first create a PelicanFileSystem and provide it with the pelican federation url. As an example using the OSDF federation

from pelicanfs.core import PelicanFileSystem

pelfs = PelicanFileSystem("pelican://osg-htc.org")

Once pelfs is pointed at your federation's director, fsspec commands can be applied to Pelican namespaces. For example:

hello_world = pelfs.cat('/ospool/uc-shared/public/OSG-Staff/validation/test.txt')
print(hello_world)

Getting an FSMap

Sometimes various systems that interact with an fsspec want a key-value mapper rather than a url. To do that, call the PelicanMap function with the namespace path and a PelicanFileSystem object rather than using the fsspec get_mapper call. For example:

from pelicanfs.core import PelicanFileSystem, PelicanMap

pelfs = PelicanFileSystem(“some-director-url”)
file1 = PelicanMap(“/namespace/file/1”, pelfs=pelfs)
file2 = PelicanMap(“/namespace/file/2”, pelfs=pelfs)
ds = xarray.open_mfdataset([file1,file2], engine='zarr')

Specifying Endpoints

The following describes how to specify endpoints to get data from, rather than letting PelicanFS and the director determine the best cache. PelicanFS allows you to specify whether to read directly from the origin (bypassing data staging altogether) or to name a specific cache to stage data into.

Note

If both direct reads and a specific cache are set, PelicanFS will use the specified cache and ignore the direct reads setting.

Enabling Direct Reads

Sometimes you might wish to read data directly from an origin rather than via a cache. To enable this at PelicanFileSystem creation, just pass in direct_reads=True to the constructor.

pelfs = PelicanFileSystem("pelican://osg-htc.org", direct_reads=True)

Specifying a Cache

If you want to specify a specific cache to stage your data into (as opposed to the highest priority working cache), this can be done by passing in a cache URL during PelicanFileSystem construction via the preferred_caches variable:

pelfs = PelicanFileSystem("pelican://osg-htc.org", preferred_caches=["https://cache.example.com"])

or

pelfs = PelicanFileSystem("pelican://osg-htc.org", preferred_caches=["https://cache.example.com",
    "https://cache2.example.com", "+"])

Note that the special cache value "+" indicates that the provided preferred caches should be prepended to the list of caches from the director.