SuperB R&D computing program: HTTP direct access to distributed resources

The SuperB asymmetric energy e+e- collider and detector to be built at the newly founded Nicola Cabibbo Lab will provide a uniquely sensitive probe of New Physics in the flavor sector of the Standard Model. Studying minute effects in the heavy quark and heavy lepton sectors requires a data sample of 75 ab-1 and a luminosity target of 10 36cm-2s-1. The increasing network performance also in the Wide Area Network environment and the capability to read data remotely with good efficiency are providing new possibilities and opening new scenarios in the data access field. Subjects like data access and data availability in a distributed environment are key points in the definition of the computing model for an HEP experiment like SuperB. R&D efforts in such a field have been brought on during the last year in order to release the Computing Technical Design Report within 2013. WAN direct access to data has been identified as one of the more interesting viable option; robust and reliable protocols as HTTP/WebDAV and xrootd are the subjects of a specific R&D line in a mid-term scenario. In this work we present the R&D results obtained in the study of new data access technologies for typical HEP use cases, focusing on specific protocols such as HTTP and WebDAV in Wide Area Network scenarios. Reports on efficiency, performance and reliability tests performed in a data analysis context have been described. Future R&D plan includes HTTP and xrootd protocols comparison tests, in terms of performance, efficiency, security and features available. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.