No Arabic abstract
For efficiency of the large production tasks distributed worldwide, it is essential to provide shared production management tools comprised of integratable and interoperable services. To enhance the ATLAS DC1 production toolkit, we introduced and tested a Virtual Data services component. For each major data transformation step identified in the ATLAS data processing pipeline (event generation, detector simulation, background pile-up and digitization, etc) the Virtual Data Cookbook (VDC) catalogue encapsulates the specific data transformation knowledge and the validated parameters settings that must be provided before the data transformation invocation. To provide for local-remote transparency during DC1 production, the VDC database server delivered in a controlled way both the validated production parameters and the templated production recipes for thousands of the event generation and detector simulation jobs around the world, simplifying the production management solutions.
The first LHC application ever to be executed in a computational Grid environment is the so-called ATLAS Data-Challenge 1, more specifically, the part assigned to the Scandinavian members of the ATLAS Collaboration. Taking advantage of the NorduGrid testbed and tools, physicists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden were able to participate in the overall exercise starting in July 2002 and continuing through the rest of 2002 and the first part of 2003 using solely the NorduGrid environment. This allowed to distribute input data over a wide area, and rely on the NorduGrid resource discovery mechanism to find an optimal cluster for job submission. During the whole Data-Challenge 1, more than 2 TB of input data was processed and more than 2.5 TB of output data was produced by more than 4750 Grid jobs.
The ever-increasing volumes of scientific data present new challenges for distributed computing and Grid technologies. The emerging Big Data revolution drives exploration in scientific fields including nanotechnology, astrophysics, high-energy physics, biology and medicine. New initiatives are transforming data-driven scientific fields enabling massive data analysis in new ways. In petascale data processing scientists deal with datasets, not individual files. As a result, a task (comprised of many jobs) became a unit of petascale data processing on the Grid. Splitting of a large data processing task into jobs enabled fine-granularity checkpointing analogous to the splitting of a large file into smaller TCP/IP packets during data transfers. Transferring large data in small packets achieves reliability through automatic re-sending of the dropped TCP/IP packets. Similarly, transient job failures on the Grid can be recovered by automatic re-tries to achieve reliable six sigma production quality in petascale data processing on the Grid. The computing experience of the ATLAS and CMS experiments provides foundation for reliability engineering scaling up Grid technologies for data processing beyond the petascale.
The HEP community is approaching an era were the excellent performances of the particle accelerators in delivering collision at high rate will force the experiments to record a large amount of information. The growing size of the datasets could potentially become a limiting factor in the capability to produce scientific results timely and efficiently. Recently, new technologies and new approaches have been developed in industry to answer to the necessity to retrieve information as quickly as possible to analyze PB and EB datasets. Providing the scientists with these modern computing tools will lead to rethinking the principles of data analysis in HEP, making the overall scientific process faster and smoother. In this paper, we are presenting the latest developments and the most recent results on the usage of Apache Spark for HEP analysis. The study aims at evaluating the efficiency of the application of the new tools both quantitatively, by measuring the performances, and qualitatively, focusing on the user experience. The first goal is achieved by developing a data reduction facility: working together with CERN Openlab and Intel, CMS replicates a real physics search using Spark-based technologies, with the ambition of reducing 1 PB of public data in 5 hours, collected by the CMS experiment, to 1 TB of data in a format suitable for physics analysis. The second goal is achieved by implementing multiple physics use-cases in Apache Spark using as input preprocessed datasets derived from official CMS data and simulation. By performing different end-analyses up to the publication plots on different hardware, feasibility, usability and portability are compared to the ones of a traditional ROOT-based workflow.
Leader-based data replication improves consistency in highly available distributed storage systems via sequential writes to the leader nodes. After a write has been committed by the leaders, follower nodes are written by a multicast mechanism and are only guaranteed to be eventually consistent. With Age of Information (AoI) as the freshness metric, we characterize how the number of leaders affects the freshness of the data retrieved by an instantaneous read query. In particular, we derive the average age of a read query for a deterministic model for the leader writing time and a probabilistic model for the follower writing time. We obtain a closed-form expression for the average age for exponentially distributed follower writing time. Our numerical results show that, depending on the relative speed of the write operation to the two groups of nodes, there exists an optimal number of leaders which minimizes the average age of the retrieved data, and that this number increases as the relative speed of writing on leaders increases.
We document the data transfer workflow, data transfer performance, and other aspects of staging approximately 56 terabytes of climate model output data from the distributed Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) archive to the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory required for tracking and characterizing extratropical storms, a phenomena of importance in the mid-latitudes. We present this analysis to illustrate the current challenges in assembling multi-model data sets at major computing facilities for large-scale studies of CMIP5 data. Because of the larger archive size of the upcoming CMIP6 phase of model intercomparison, we expect such data transfers to become of increasing importance, and perhaps of routine necessity. We find that data transfer rates using the ESGF are often slower than what is typically available to US residences and that there is significant room for improvement in the data transfer capabilities of the ESGF portal and data centers both in terms of workflow mechanics and in data transfer performance. We believe performance improvements of at least an order of magnitude are within technical reach using current best practices, as illustrated by the performance we achieved in transferring the complete raw data set between two high performance computing facilities. To achieve these performance improvements, we recommend: that current best practices (such as the Science DMZ model) be applied to the data servers and networks at ESGF data centers; that sufficient financial and human resources be devoted at the ESGF data centers for systems and network engineering tasks to support high performance data movement; and that performance metrics for data transfer between ESGF data centers and major computing facilities used for climate data analysis be established, regularly tested, and published.