On the road to a scientific data lake for the High Luminosity LHC era

Abstract

The experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider use the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, the WLCG, for its distributed computing infrastructure. Through the distributed workload and data management systems, they provide seamless access to hundreds of grid, HPC and cloud based computing and storage resources that are distributed worldwide to thousands of physicists. LHC experiments annually process more than an exabyte of data using an average of 500,000 distributed CPU cores, to enable hundreds of new scientific results from the collider. However, the resources available to the experiments have been insufficient to meet data processing, simulation and analysis needs over the past five years as the volume of data from the LHC has grown. The problem will be even more severe for the next LHC phases. High Luminosity LHC will be a multiexabyte challenge where the envisaged Storage and Compute needs are a factor 10 to 100 above the expected technology evolution. The particle physics community needs to evolve current computing and data organization models in order to introduce changes in the way it uses and manages the infrastructure, focused on optimizations to bring performance and efficiency not forgetting simplification of operations. In this paper we highlight a recent R&D project related to scientific data lake and federated data storage.