Web Proxy Auto Discovery for Dynamically Created Web Proxies

Scientific Computing Division, Fermilab, Batavia, IL, USA

^* Corresponding author: dwd@fnal.gov

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

The WLCG Web Proxy Auto Discovery (WPAD) service provides a convenient mechanism for jobs running anywhere on the WLCG to dynamically discover web proxy cache servers that are nearby. The web proxy caches are general purpose for a number of different http applications, but different applications have different usage characteristics and not all proxy caches are engineered to work with the heaviest loads. For this reason, the initial sources of information for WLCG WPAD were the static configurations that ATLAS and CMS maintain for the Conditions data that they read through the Frontier Distributed Database system, which is the most demanding popular WLCG application for web proxy caches. That works well for use at traditional statically defined WLCG sites, but now that usage of commercial clouds is increasing, there is also a need for web proxy caches to dynamically register themselves as they are created. A package called Shoal had already been created to manage dynamically created web proxy caches. This paper describes the integration of the Shoal package into the WLCG WPAD system, such that both statically and dynamically created web proxy caches can be located from a single source. It also describes other improvements to the WLCG WPAD system since the last CHEP publication.