HPCwire: STEP'09 Demonstrates LHC Readiness

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

July 01, 2009

STEP'09 Demonstrates LHC Readiness

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

GENEVA, July 1 -- Preparations are under way for the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. One of the most important systems needed to support the experiments that will utilise this great machine is the global computing grid: the worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). After months of preparation and two intensive weeks of 24 x 7 operation, the LHC experiments are celebrating the achievement of a new set of goals aimed at demonstrating full readiness for the LHC data taking run expected to start later this year.

Whilst there have been several large-scale data-processing tests in recent years, this was the first production demonstration involving all of the key elements from data taking through to analysis. Records of all sorts were established: data taking throughput, data import and export rates between the various grid sites, as well as huge numbers of analysis, simulation and reprocessing jobs -- ATLAS alone running close to 1M analysis jobs and achieving 6GB/s, of "grid traffic," the equivalent of a DVD worth of data a second, sustained over long periods.

This result is particularly timely as it coincides with the transition of grids into long-term sustainable e-infrastructures, clearly of fundamental importance to projects of the lifetime of the LHC. With the restart of the LHC only months away, one can expect a large increase in the number of grid users: from several hundred unique users today to several thousand when data taking and analysis commences. This can only happen through significant streamlining of operations and the simplification of end-users' interaction with the grid. Scale Testing for the Experiment Programme '09 (STEP'09) included massive-scale testing of end-user analysis scenarios, including "community-support" infrastructures, whereby the community is trained and enabled to be largely self-supporting, backed by a core of grid and application experts.

WLCG combines the IT power of more than 140 computer centres, the result of collaboration between 33 countries.

Sergio Bertolucci, director of research and computing at CERN, said: "The four LHC experiments -- ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb -- have demonstrated their ability to manage their nominal data rates concurrently. For the first time all aspects of the experiments' computing were exercised simultaneously: simulation, data processing and analysis. This gives them the confidence that they will be able to efficiently analyze the first data from the LHC later this year."

Bob Jones, director of the EGEE project, remarked: "Such a significant achievement is also a valuable testament to the state of maturity of the EGEE infrastructure and its ability to interoperate with major grid infrastructures in other parts of the world. Ensuring that this level of service continues uninterrupted as we transition from EGEE to EGI is clearly essential to our users, including flagship communities such as high energy physics."

"This is another significant step to demonstrating shared infrastructures can be used by multiple high throughput science communities simultaneously," said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid consortium. "ATLAS and CMS are not only proving the usability of OSG, but contributing to maturing national distributed facilities in the US for other sciences."

David Britton, the GridPP Project Leader, reported: "In the UK, STEP09 ran very smoothly at the majority of sites, which allowed the focus to be on understanding the performance and tuning the infrastructure. The RAL Tier-1 performed exceedingly well with only a single out-of-hours call out over the two week period. Valuable information was obtained on the performance of tape-drives under realistic workflows; the OPN network was tested by laying down additional UDP traffic on top of the STEP09 data; and the fairshare system was successfully tuned to balance the load between experiments."

Gonzalo Merino, manager of the Tier1 centre in Barcelona, wrote: "The Spanish WLCG sites met the STEP09 targets. It has been a very valuable exercise since many of the experiment workflows have been tested simultaneously at unprecedented scale, well above the nominal values for LHC data taking. The Tier-1 at PIC has provided a very stable and reliable service at record breaking levels: exchanging up to 80 terabytes per day with other WLCG sites and processing data at more than 2 GBytes per second. This gives us confidence that the Spanish WLCG sites are ready for data taking."

David Foster, head of the LHC Optical Private Network activity, concluded: "The LHC Optical Private Network transporting data between the sites has proven its capability both in terms of performance and resiliency during STEP'09. New capabilities emerging in the 40Gbps and 100Gbps range should enable us to keep up with the anticipated data distribution needs of the LHC experiments."

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html