New data access with HTTP/WebDAV in the ATLAS experiment

With the exponential growth of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) data in the years 2010-2012, distributed computing has become the established way to analyse collider data. The ATLAS experiment Grid infrastructure includes more than 130 sites worldwide, ranging from large national computing centres to smaller university clusters. So far the storage technologies and access protocols to the clusters that host this tremendous amount of data vary from site to site. HTTP/WebDAV offers the possibility to use a unified industry standard to access the storage. We present the deployment and testing of HTTP/WebDAV for local and remote data access in the ATLAS experiment for the new data management system Rucio and the PanDA workload management system. Deployment and large scale tests have been performed using the Grid testing system HammerCloud and the ROOT HTTP plugin Davix.