Rucio beyond ATLAS: experiences from Belle II, CMS, DUNE, EISCAT3D, LIGO/VIRGO, SKA, XENON

¹ European Organization for Nuclear Research
² Brookhaven National Laboratory
³ Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
⁴ Science and Technology Facilities Council
⁵ University of Oslo
⁶ Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration
⁷ Georgia Institute of Technology
⁸ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
⁹ Square Kilometre Array Organisation
¹⁰ Stockholm University

^* e-mail: Mario.Lassnig@cern.ch
Copyright 2020 CERN, CC-BY-4.0 licence.

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

For many scientific projects, data management is an increasingly complicated challenge. The number of data-intensive instruments generating unprecedented volumes of data is growing and their accompanying workflows are becoming more complex. Their storage and computing resources are heterogeneous and are distributed at numerous geographical locations belonging to different administrative domains and organisations. These locations do not necessarily coincide with the places where data is produced nor where data is stored, analysed by researchers, or archived for safe long-term storage. To fulfil these needs, the data management system Rucio has been developed to allow the high-energy physics experiment ATLAS at LHC to manage its large volumes of data in an efficient and scalable way. But ATLAS is not alone, and several diverse scientific projects have started evaluating, adopting, and adapting the Rucio system for their own needs. As the Rucio community has grown, many improvements have been introduced, customisations have been added, and many bugs have been fixed. Additionally, new dataflows have been investigated and operational experiences have been documented. In this article we collect and compare the common successes, pitfalls, and oddities that arose in the evaluation efforts of multiple diverse experiments, and compare them with the ATLAS experience. This includes the high-energy physics experiments Belle II and CMS, the neutrino experiment DUNE, the scattering radar experiment EISCAT3D, the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and VIRGO, the SKA radio telescope, and the dark matter search experiment XENON.