https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921404002
Caching technologies for Tier-2 sites: A UK perspective
1
University of Glasgow,
Glasgow,
G12 8QQ
UK
2
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Campus,
Oxon, OX11 0QX,
UK
3
The University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL,
UK
4
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, E1 4NS,
UK
5
University of Edinburgh, King’s Buildings,
Edinburgh,
EH9 3FD,
UK
6
Durham University, Stockton Road,
Durham,
DH1 3LE,
UK
Published online: 17 September 2019
Pressures from both WLCG VOs and externalities have led to a desire to "simplify" data access and handling for Tier-2 resources across the Grid. This has mostly been imagined in terms of reducing book-keeping for VOs, and total replicas needed across sites. One common direction of motion is to increasing the amount of remote-access to data for jobs, which is also seen as enabling the development of administratively-cheaper Tier-2 subcat-egories, reducing manpower and equipment costs. Caching technologies are often seen as a "cheap" way to ameliorate the increased latency (and decreased bandwidth) introduced by ubiquitous remote-access approaches, but the usefulness of caches is strongly dependant on the reuse of the data thus cached. We report on work done in the UK at four GridPP Tier-2 sites - ECDF, Glasgow, RALPP and Durham - to investigate the suitability of transparent caching via the recently-rebranded XCache (Xrootd Proxy Cache) for both ATLAS and CMS workloads, and to support workloads by other caching approaches (such as the ARC CE Cache).
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
