ATLAS DDM integration in ARC

The Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF) consists of Grid resources running ARC middleware in Scandinavia and other countries. These resources serve many virtual organisations and contribute a large fraction of total worldwide resources for the ATLAS experiment, whose data is distributed and managed by the DQ2 software. Managing ATLAS data within NDGF and between NDGF and other Grids used by ATLAS (the LHC Computing Grid and the Open Science Grid) presents a unique challenge for several reasons. Firstly, the entry point for data, the Tier 1 centre, is physically distributed among heterogeneous resources in several countries and yet must present a single access point for all data stored within the centre. The middleware framework used in NDGF differs significantly from other Grids, specifically in the way that all data movement and registration is performed by services outside the worker node environment. Also, the service used for cataloging the location of data files is different from other Grids but must still be useable by DQ2 and ATLAS users to locate data within NDGF. This paper presents in detail how we solve these issues to allow seamless access worldwide to data within NDGF.