Towards an HTTP Ecosystem for HEP Data Access

• Fabrizio Furano (CERN)

Room: 40/S2-D01 - Salle Dirac We present a vision of the potential for HTTP's use by HEP computing following the successful demonstrations of the use of HTTP for access, transfer and federation, based on the recent release of a new HTTP/WebDAV interface for DPM/LFC. The application domain goes from large scale, Grid-like computing to the data access from laptops, profiting from tools that are shared with the Web community, like browsers, clients libraries and others. The IT-GT group, together with other teams such as dCache and STORM in the context of EMI, has been putting effort into this direction in the last years. Among the results are newer releases of DPM/LFC with improved software stacks built with modern architectures, and which use widely available components like Apache. The overall goal is to leverage standards and standard practices, and use them to provide the extensions that are needed to fulfil the complex problem of Data Access in HEP. Other points of interest are about harmonizing the possibilities given by the HTTP/WebDAV protocols with existing frameworks like ROOT and already existing Storage Federations based on the XROOTD framework. The idea is to contribute the parts that can make possible an ecosystem of services and applications, where the HEP-related features are covered, and the door is open to standard solutions and tools provided by third parties, in the context of the Web and Cloud technologies.

Discussion Room: 40/S2-D01 - Salle Dirac