Scaling HEP to Web Size with RESTful Protocols: the Frontier Example

The World-Wide-Web has scaled to an enormous size. The largest single contributor to its scalability is the HTTP protocol, particularly when used in conformity to REST (REpresentational State Transfer) principles. High Energy Physics (HEP) computing also has to scale to an enormous size, so it makes sense to base much of it on RESTful protocols. Frontier, which reads databases with an HTTP-based RESTful protocol, has successfully scaled to deliver production detector conditions data from both the CMS and ATLAS LHC detectors to hundreds of thousands of computer cores worldwide. Frontier is also able to re-use a large amount of standard software that runs the Web: on the clients, caches, and servers. I discuss the specific ways in which HTTP and REST enable high scalability and for Frontier. I also briefly discuss another protocol used in HEP computing that is HTTP-based and RESTful, and another protocol that could benefit from it. My goal of is to encourage HEP protocol designers to consider HTTP and REST whenever the same information is needed in many places.