CRIC: a unified information system for WLCG and beyond

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is an innovative distributed environment which is deployed through the use of grid computing technologies in order to provide computing and storage resources to the LHC experiments for data processing and physics analysis. Following increasing demands of LHC computing needs toward high luminosity era, the experiments are engaged in an ambitious program to extend the capability of WLCG distributed environment, for instance including opportunistically used resources such as High-Performance Computers (HPCs), cloud platforms and volunteer computers. In order to be effectively used by the LHC experiments, all these diverse distributed resources should be described in detail. This implies easy service discovery of shared physical resources, detailed description of service configurations and experiment-specific data structures is needed. In this contribution, we present a high-level information component of a distributed computing environment, the Computing Resource Information Catalogue (CRIC) which aims to facilitate distributed computing operations for the LHC experiments and consolidate WLCG topology information. In addition, CRIC performs data validation and provides coherent view and topology description to the LHC VOs for service discovery and configuration. CRIC represents the evolution of ATLAS Grid Information System (AGIS) into the common experiment independent high-level information framework. CRIC’s mission is to serve not just ATLAS Collaboration needs for the description of the distributed environment but any other virtual organization relying on large scale distributed infrastructure as well as the WLCG on the global scope. The contribution describes CRIC architecture, implementation of data models, collectors, user interfaces, advanced authentication and access control components of the system.