Data access is key to science driven by distributed high-throughput computing
(DHTC), an essential technology for many major research projects such as High
Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. However, achieving efficient data access
becomes quite difficult when many independent storage sites are involved
because users are burdened with learning the intricacies of accessing each
system and keeping careful track of data location. We present an alternate
approach: the Any Data, Any Time, Anywhere infrastructure. Combining several
existing software products, AAA presents a global, unified view of storage
systems - a "data federation," a global filesystem for software delivery, and a
workflow management system. We present how one HEP experiment, the Compact Muon
Solenoid (CMS), is utilizing the AAA infrastructure and some simple performance
metrics.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, submitted to 2nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium
on Big Data Computing (BDC) 201