Retiring CVMFS for OSDF Data¶

Effective Date: O4a public data release, 23 August 2025

Service Impacted: All CVMFS repositories listed below will cease to exist on this date

Details¶

Overview¶

The CernVM File System is a method of distributing files globally to computing centres. It was originally developed primarily as a means to distribute software, and remains optimized for that use case. However, it is also possible to distribute larger files through infrastructure that combines the CVMFS interface (which presents what appears to be a file system mounted under /cvmfs/) with a data federation underneath that actually transfers the files to remote computing nodes that need to access such data. In many cases, this data is proprietary, meaning that an appropriate credential is required to access it, whether in an HTCondor workflow or directly from a POSIX-like shell.

This infrastructure is inherently less robust and increasingly out-of-date for best practices for scientific workflows. Additionally, it relies crucially on services that scientific computing partners outside of the LVK provide us, yet which are unusual in the broader scientific computing ecosystem and therefore more likely to encounter problems. The nature of the infrastructure means that such problems are more opaque, require a disproportionate amount of computing staff effort to manage, and will necessarily result in more frequent workflow failures that require manual user intervention. Accordingly, the Computing and Software Working Group will be retiring this service on the effective date above.

Affected Repositories¶

The complete list of affected repositories is:

/cvmfs/ligo.osgstorage.org
/cvmfs/gwosc.osgstorage.org
/cvmfs/igwn.osgstorage.org
/cvmfs/virgo.storage.igwn.org
/cvmfs/ligo.storage.igwn.org
/cvmfs/shared.storage.igwn.org
/cvmfs/kagra.storage.igwn.org
/cvmfs/ligo-test.storage.igwn.org

The repository /cvmfs/software.igwn.org/ is not included in this service retirement.

Impact¶

You or your computing workflow will be impacted by this if you currently access files in a POSIX-like manner by reading them from /cvmfs/<retired repository>/. All of these files are also available through the Open Science Data Federation by either using HTCondor File transfer within HTCondor workflows, or by using command line tools from a POSIX shell.

If this affects you, you should modify your workflow (following the documentation above) to request OSDF URIs from data discovery tools, or else manually program your workflow to use such URIs in combination with HTCondor's file transfer mechanism, for cases where the data you wish to access is not discoverable by IGWN supported data discovery tools.

If you encounter difficulties following the linked documentation to update either your workflow or other use of these repositories, then please open a helpdesk ticket and select the appropriate template.