Everything scales up! Even the amount of acquired raw data in XENON1T. To handle data transfers easily, the XENON collaboration decided to let the Rucio Scientific Data Managment software do all the work. Rucio is developed at CERN and meant to manage scientific data. Data transfers, book keeping, easy data access and safety against data loss are its big advantage.

XENON1T is taking about one Terabyte of raw data per day. The detector is located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sass (LNGS) in Italy and the data need to be shipped out to dedicated computing centers for data reduction and analysis.

Individual Rucio clients access dedicated GRID disk space on world wide distributed computer facilities. Everything is controlled by a Rucio server which keeps track on storage locations, data sizes and transfers within the computer infrastructure. Rucio is developed in Python and its distribution becomes very simple.

The First Rucio Community Workshop was held at CERN on 1st and 2nd of March. Since Rucio was developed for the ATLAS collaboration, other experiments like XENON and AMS started to use Rucio a while ago. Nowadays, more collaborations such as EISCAT 3D, LIGO or NA62 (just to mention a few) became interested. The workshop allowed to meet all each other: developers and users discussed several use cases and how to improve Rucio for individual collaborations.

The XENON1T data distribution framework

We presented our integration of Rucio in the existing data handling framework. XENON1T raw data are distributed to five computing centers in Europe and the US. Each one is connected to the European Grid Interface (EGI) or the Open Science Grid (OSG) for data reduction (“processing”). Raw data are processed on the GRID and the reduced data sets are provided for the analysts on Research Computing Center (RCC) in Chicago. Beyond this, the XENON collaboration will continue to use Rucio for the upcoming XENONnT upgrade.