Recent Evolution of the Offline Computing Model of the NOvA Experiment

The NOvA experiment at Fermilab is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to study νe appearance in a ν_μ beam. Over the last few years there has been intense work to streamline the computing infrastructure in preparation for data, which started to flow in from the far detector in Fall 2013. Major accomplishments for this effort include migration to the use of off-site resources through the use of the Open Science Grid and upgrading the file-handling framework from simple disk storage to a tiered system using a comprehensive data management and delivery system to find and access files on either disk or tape storage. NOvA has already produced more than 6.5 million files and more than 1 PB of raw data and Monte Carlo simulation files which are managed under this model. The current system has demonstrated sustained rates of up to 1 TB/hour of file transfer by the data handling system. NOvA pioneered the use of new tools and this paved the way for their use by other Intensity Frontier experiments at Fermilab. Most importantly, the new framework places the experiment's infrastructure on a firm foundation, and is ready to produce the files needed for first physics.