The RACF provides computing and data storages services of various flavors for the RHIC, LSST, and US Atlas user communities to support their respective scientific programs.
RACF Facility Users
Users of the RACF facility fall into one of the following categories:
- On-site (BNL-based) and off-site interactive users, predominantly RHIC, LSST, and on-site US ATLAS users.
- Grid based users, predominantly US ATLAS users.
- Experiment computing coordinators, e.g., "Physics Production" from US ATLAS, PHENIX, STAR.
- Other computing facilities, such as the US ATLAS Tier 2 facilities.
RACF Facility Documentation
The documentation on this site is organized primarily by the user type (grid vs. interactive) or the experiment (RHIC, LSST, US ATLAS). In addition, given the nature of the services provided or hosted by the facility, information may be provide on this site or on the web sites that are maintained by the various RACF experiment groups. The following are links to the different sources of documentation:
- RACF provided documentation
- Non RACF provided documentation
Services Provided by the RACF Facility
The services provided by the facility fall into the following categories:
- Archival (off-line) Data Storage
- Online Data Storage
- Physics Analysis Computing Resources (batch and interactive)
- General Purpose Computing Resources (e.g., email, printing, document editing)
- Grid Computing and Grid Support Services
Resources Managed by the RACF Facility
To provide these services, the RACF facility manages the following major hardware and software resources:
- Linux/x86 based processor farm.
- HPSS Hierarchical Storage System (i.e., a large farm of robotic tape libraries, data servers, and data management software).
- Centralized disk storage resources (e.g., NFS servers, AFS servers).
- Distributed disk storage resources (e.g., Xrootd/dCache)
- Grid infrastructure servers
- Interactive computing resources (e.g., SSH gateways, FTP/SCP/sftp gateways)
- Facility Infrastructure and support servers (e.g., web servers, authentication/authorization servers)