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Welcome to the CERN Tape Archive Documentation

CERN Tape Archive

The CERN Tape Archive (CTA) is CERN’s Free and Open Source Software system for data archival to tape. It is used as the archival storage system for the custodial copy of all physics data at CERN. CTA was designed to be a stable system that can reliably ingest and store the massive amounts of data the LHC produces.

CTA is packaged and distributed as a public release, free from CERN-specific dependencies, together with a set of operations tools. As a system, it is used in conjunction with a disk buffer such as EOS or dCache. Here at CERN, the combination of CTA and EOS is the archival solution for LHC Run–3 and beyond.

This website contains the public documentation of the CTA system. Complementary to the information on this website, there is also a list of presentations and publications available on the main CTA website.

Source Code on GitLab Community Forum Release Notes Development Tickets

Getting Started

The documentation is divided into three main parts:

  • Overview: This section contains a general overview of the CTA system and provides all the necessary terminology.
  • Operations: This section contains instructions on how to manage and maintain a CTA deployment.
  • Development: This section is relevant for developers of the CTA software.