Nordugrid ARC Datastaging and Cache: Efficiency gains on HPC and cloud resources

¹ University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1072 Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway
² Lund University, Box 117, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
³ Uppsala University, Box 516, 751 20 Uppsala
⁴ Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen

^* e-mail: maikenp@uio.no
^** e-mail: balazs.konya@hep.lu.se

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is today comprised of a range of different types of resources such as cloud centers, large and small HPC centers, volunteer computing as well as the traditional grid resources. The Nordic Tier 1 (NT1) is a WLCG computing infrastructure distributed over the Nordic countries. The NT1 deploys the Nordugrid ARC-CE, which is non-intrusive and lightweight, originally developed to cater for HPC centers where no middleware could be installed on the worker nodes. The NT1 runs ARC in the native Nordugrid mode which contrary to the Pilot mode leaves jobs data transfers up to ARC. ARCs data transfer capabilities together with the ARC Cache are the most important features of ARC.

In this article we will describe the datastaging and cache functionality of the ARC-CE set up as an edge service to an HPC or cloud resource, and show the gain in efficiency this model provides compared to a traditional pilot model, especially for sites with remote storage.