Third Party Copy

Deployed

LHC data is constantly beign moved between computing and storage sites to support analysis, processing, and simluation; this is done at a scale that is currently unique within the science community. For example, the CMS experiment on the LHC manages approximately 200PB of data and, on a daily basis, moves 1PB between sites. Across all four experiments, the global data movement is regularly peaks above 250Gbps in 2021 – and this was without the LHC accelerator taking new data!

The HL-LHC promises a data deluge: we will need to modernize the infrastructure to sustain at least 1Tbps by 2027 and, likely, peeking at twice that level. Historically, bulk data movement has been done with the GridFTP protocol; as the community looks to the increased data volumes of HL-LHC and GridFTP becomes increasingly niche, there is a need to use modern software, protocols, and techniques to move data. The IRIS-HEP DOMA area - in collaboration with the WLCG DOMA activity - is helping the LHC (and HEP in general) transition to using HTTP for bulk data transfer. This bulk data transfer between sites is often referred to ``third party copy” or simply TPC.

The first phase of bulk data transfer modernization is the switch from GridFTP to HTTP for TPC. The last milestone for the protocol switch project was achieved with the successful completion of the WLCG Data Challenge in October 2021. Subsequently, both CMS and ATLAS have declared that supporting GridFTP is optional (some sites, like UCSD, have already decommissioned their endpoints) and IRIS-HEP is focusing on token-based authorization of transfers for Year 5 of the project.


WLCG Data Challenge 2021
Data Challenge 2021

Throughtput achieved per protocol during the 2021 Data Challenge. The "davs" series represents the use of HTTP-TPC and the WebDAV protocol.


In the following one can read about the different milestones established for this project and how and when they were achieved.


TPC rates from testing
How fast is HTTP?

The above graph shows data movement rates (up to 24Gbps) for a single host, achieved during standalone tests; a typical LHC site will load-balance across multiple hosts in order to saturate available network links. With a sufficiently performant HTTP server, we have observed the protocol can go as quickly as the underlying network infrastructure.


During the development phase of IRIS-HEP, the team worked with a variety of implementations to improve code and ensure interoperability. The first goal was to get all commonly-used storage implementations for the LHC to provide an HTTP endpoint. Initially, the goal was set to get one site to get more that 30% of its data using the HTTP protocol. This was accomplished in 2020; for 2021, the goal is to have every LHC site to use HTTP-TPC.

For CMS, we picked 2 sites, Nebraska and UCSD, to be the ones leading the transition by using the HTTP-TPC protocol for all their incoming production transfers from the many sites which can support such protocol.


GridFTP vs HTTP
Percentage of data transferred to UCSD using GridFTP and HTTP

The above shows the amount of data transferred to UCSD using the GridFTP protocol with respect to HTTP during July 2020.


The next goal was to have a single site having 50% of all its data being transferred via HTTPS.

HTTPS vs non-HTTPS
Percentage of data transferred to/from Nebraska via HTTPS vs non-HTTPS

The above shows the amount of production data transferred to and from Nebraska using HTTPS with respect to non-HTTPS during April 2021.



On the ATLAS side, the transition occurred at an even faster pace; most of their sites providede an HTTPS endpoint as of April 2021.


Atlas protocol breakdown
Protocol breakdown for transfers at all ATLAS sites

The percentage of data transferred among all ATLAS sites (excluding tape endpoints) using each of the available protocols during April 2021.



One of the 2022 milestones for this project was to demonstrate the ability to sustain aggregate 100Gbps data flows from a source storage using HTTP-TPC. During SC21, the DOMA team demonstrated the ability to use 3 XRootD clusters in 3 different locations, UCSD, Caltech and the Starlight point of presence in Chicago. The latter 2 clusters were used as a source and the former as a sink. Caltech was connected to UCSD via a dedicated 100Gbps link and Starlight had two 100Gbps links available to connect to UCSD.
Using the PRP’s Nautilus cluster we were able to easily deploy the software and configurations necessary for these experiments.
In our test we were able to reach a disk-to-disk ‘real’ transfer rate of 125Gbps out of theoretical 300Gbps network limit.

SC21 Tests
Data transfer rate achieved during SC21 Tests

This plots shows the breakdown per node and interface of the transfer rate achieved from the node at Caltech and Starlight during the SC21 tests.


The observed limitation for the SC21 demo was the CPU power available on the Starlight cluster; in Starlight, we were only able to get 12.5% of the available bandwidth while at Caltech’s cluster we reached 100% of its capacity.

More Information

Team

Presentations

Publications

  • Systematic benchmarking of HTTPS third party copy on 100Gbps links using XRootD, Fajardo, Edgar, Aashay Arora, Diego Davila, Richard Gao, Frank Würthwein, and Brian Bockelman, arXiv:2103.12116 (2021). (Submitted to CHEP 2019) (22 Mar 2021).
  • WLCG Authorisation from X.509 to Tokens, Brian Bockelman and Andrea Ceccanti and Ian Collier and Linda Cornwall and Thomas Dack and Jaroslav Guenther and Mario Lassnig and Maarten Litmaath and Paul Millar and Mischa Sallé and Hannah Short and Jeny Teheran and Romain Wartel, arXiv:2007.03602 [cs.CR] (Submitted to CHEP 2019) (08 Nov 2019).
  • Third-party transfers in WLCG using HTTP, Brian Bockelman and Andrea Ceccanti and Fabrizio Furano and Paul Millar and Dmitry Litvintsev and Alessandra Forti, arXiv:2007.03490 [cs.DC] (Submitted to CHEP 2019) (08 Nov 2019).