• Grid File Transfer Service

  • This service manages the data transfer between Grid computing centers.
  • Kontakt:

General Description

The Grid File Transfer Service (FTS) belongs to the gLite Grid middleware distribution. It manages file transfer jobs between different Grid sites via so-called 'channels' and provides scheduling and prioritization of the transfers. FTS is one of the central Grid services provided by a Tier-1 site within the worldwide LHC Computing Grid Project.
FTS is the lowest-level data movement service defined in the gLite architecture. It is responsible for moving sets of files from one site to another, allowing participating sites to control the network resource usage. It is designed for point-to-point transfer of physical files. FTS has dedicated interfaces for managing the network resources and to display statistics of ongoing transfers. Optionally, FTS supports Logical File Names (LFNs), i.e. is able to provide catalogue lookup and registration. It allows to allocate the available bandwidth on a given network link to different Virtual Organizations (VOs) and provides a scheduling mechanism for file transfer requests.
Within the worldwide LHC Computing Grid Project, wLCG, FTS is one of the central Grid services a Tier-1 site has to deploy and operate. All file transfers between the Tier-1 and associated Tier-2 sites as well as all transfers from other Tier-1 sites are managed using the FTS service.
FTS is rarely used by single users but by higher level, global data management frameworks like PhEDEx or DQ2.

Utilization Period

FTS is designed to run 24 hours a day on 7 days a week, with a minimum yearly average availability of 98%. Service interventions are announced at least one week in advance.

Booking Conditions

No particular booking is required to use this service. However, a user MUST have a valid Grid certificate of an accepted Certificate Authority and MUST be member of a valid Virtual Organization (VO). The service is initiated by respective commands that can be submitted from any gLite user interface either interactively or through batch submissions.

Deregistration

No particular deregistration is required for this service. A user with an expired Grid certificate or VO membership is automatically blocked from using FTS.

IT-Security

The FTS database and log files contain information on the transfer status of jobs and the certificate that was used to initiate a transfer or query the FTS web service. No personal data nor the data files themselves are stored on FTS nodes or in the database back-end.

Included services

  • This service manages the file transfer from other Tier-1 centers to our Tier-1 center DE-KIT
  • This service manages the file transfer between Tier-1 and Tier-2 centers in both directions

Not included services

  • This service does not manage the file transfer from our Tier-1 center DE-KIT to other Tier-1 centers
  • This service does not manage the file transfer from the Tier-0 to our Tier-1 center DE-KIT

Organisational requirements

  • The user MUST have a valid Grid certificate of an accepted Certificate Authority.
  • The user MUST be member of a valid Virtual Organization (VO).

Technical requirements

  • VOMS server of the virtual organization.