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The volume of data moving through a network increases with new scientific experiments and simulations. Network bandwidth requirements also increase proportionally to deliver data within a certain time frame. We observe that a significant portion of the popular dataset is transferred multiple times to different users as well as to the same user for various reasons. In-network data caching for the shared data has shown to reduce the redundant data transfers and consequently save network traffic volume. In addition, overall application performance is expected to improve with in-network caching because access to the locally cached data results in lower latency. This paper shows how much data was shared over the study period, how much network traffic volume was consequently saved, and how much the temporary in-network caching increased the scientific application performance. It also analyzes data access patterns in applications and the impacts of caching nodes on the regional data repository. From the results, we observed that the network bandwidth demand was reduced by nearly a factor of 3 over the study period. 

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider provides a data challenge. The amount of data recorded from the experiments and transported to hundreds of sites will see a thirty fold increase in annual data volume. A systematic approach to contrast the performance of different Third Party Copy (TPC) transfer protocols arises. Two contenders, XRootD-HTTPS and the GridFTP are evaluated in their performance for transferring files from one server to another over 100Gbps interfaces. The benchmarking is done by scheduling pods on the Pacific Research Platform Kubernetes cluster to ensure reproducible and repeatable results. This opens a future pathway for network testing of any TPC transfer protocol. 

As we approach the Exascale era, it is important to verify that the existing frameworks and tools will still work at that scale. Moreover, public Cloud computing has been emerging as a viable solution for both prototyping and urgent computing. Using the elasticity of the Cloud, we have thus put in place a pre-exascale HTCondor setup for running a scientific simulation in the Cloud, with the chosen application being IceCube's photon propagation simulation. I.e. this was not a purely demonstration run, but it was also used to produce valuable and much needed scientific results for the IceCube collaboration. In order to reach the desired scale, we aggregated GPU resources across 8 GPU models from many geographic regions across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. Using this setup, we reached a peak of over 51k GPUs corresponding to almost 380 PFLOP32s, for a total integrated compute of about 100k GPU hours. In this paper we provide the description of the setup, the problems that were discovered and overcome, as well as a short description of the actual science output of the exercise. 

The University of California system maintains excellent networking between its campuses and a number of other Universities in California, including Caltech, most of them being connected at 100 Gbps. UCSD and Caltech Tier2 centers have joined their disk systems into a single logical caching system, with worker nodes from both sites accessing data from disks at either site. This successful setup has been in place for the last two years. However, coherently managing nodes at multiple physical locations is not trivial and requires an update on the operations model used. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) provides Kubernetes resource pool spanning resources in the science demilitarized zones (DMZs) in several campuses in California and worldwide. We show how we migrated the XCache services from bare-metal deployments into containers using the PRP cluster. This paper presents the reasoning behind our hardware decisions and the experience in migrating to and operating in a mixed environment.