Abstract

The DIRAC project is developing interware to build and operate distributed computing systems. It provides a development framework and a rich set of services for both Workload and Data Management tasks of large scientific communities. A number of High Energy Physics and Astrophysics collaborations have adopted DIRAC as the base for their computing models. DIRAC was initially developed for the LHCb experiment at LHC, CERN. Later, the Belle II, BES III and CTA experiments as well as the linear collider detector collaborations started using DIRAC for their computing systems.Some of the experiments built their DIRAC-based systems from scratch, others migrated from previous solutions, ad-hoc or based on different middlewares. Adaptation of DIRAC for a particular experiment was enabled through the creation of extensions to meet their specific requirements. Each experiment has a heterogeneous set of computing and storage resources at their disposal that were aggregated through DIRAC into a coherent pool. Users from different experiments can interact with the system in different ways depending on their specific tasks, expertise level and previous experience using command line tools, python APIs or Web Portals. In this contribution we will summarize the experience of using DIRAC in particle physics collaborations. The problems of migration to DIRAC from previous systems and their solutions will be presented. An overview of specific DIRAC extensions will be given. We hope that this review will be useful for experiments considering an update, or for those designing their computing models.

Highlights

  • The DIRAC project[1] enables communities to interact with distributed computing resources

  • The aim of this paper is to show how DIRAC can satisfy the requirements of different Virtual Organizations (VOs), and which technical solutions have been adopted

  • Summary and prospects DIRAC is an open source project, very actively used and developed. It satisfies the requirements and use cases of several communities by providing extensibility at several levels, the possibility to plug in new types of resources, and the flexibility requested for different use-cases

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Summary

Introduction

The DIRAC project[1] enables communities to interact with distributed computing resources. It forms a layer that hides diversities across computing, storage, catalog, and queuing resources. DIRAC has been adopted by several HEP and non-HEP experiments’ communities, with different goals, intents, resources and workflows. DIRAC is a truly open source project: it has been started as an LHCb project, and open sourced in 2009 following interest of adoption from another community.

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