Data management technologies in LHC Computing Grid

Performance, reliability and scalability in data management are cornerstones in the context of the computing Grid, where the volumes of data to be moved are huge, and the data analysis must be supported by high-performance and scalable storage resources. Nowadays, the data management issues are particularly important, considering the large data size and I/O load that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is going to produce. The Enabling Grids for Enabling e-Science (EGEE) EU funded project, where the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) is a key member, is responsible to release and maintain the currently world’s largest production grid, a sophisticated hierarchy of data management and storage tools developed to help physicist, but also other scientific communities, in the face of distributed data management problems. This paper reviews the main technologies employed for storage and data management in EGEE, and in the associated Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project