Lightweight site federation for CMS support

Abstract

There is a general trend in WLCG towards the federation of resources, aiming for increased simplicity, efficiency, flexibility, and availability. Although general VO-agnostic federation of resources between two independent and autonomous resource centres may prove arduous, a considerable amount of flexibility in resource sharing can be achieved in the context of a single WLCG VO, with a relatively simple approach. We have demonstrated this for PIC and CIEMAT, the Spanish Tier-1 and Tier-2 sites for CMS, by making use of the existing CMS xrootd federation infrastructure and profiting from the common CE/batch technology used by the two centres. This work describes how compute slots are shared between the two sites, so that the capacity of one site can be dynamically increased with idle execution slots from the remote site, and how data can be efficiently accessed irrespective of its location. Our contribution includes measurements for diverse CMS workflows comparing performances between local and remote execution, and can also be regarded as a benchmark to explore future potential scenarios, where storage resources would be concentrated in a reduced number of sites.