Speaker
A. Wagner
(CERN)
Description
CERN has about 5500 Desktop PCs. These computers offer a large pool of resources
that can be used for physics calculations outside office hours.
The paper describes a project to make use of the spare CPU cycles of these PCs for
LHC tracking studies. The client server application is implemented as a lightweight,
modular screensaver and a Web Application containing the physics job repository. The
information exchange between client and server is done using the HTTP protocol. The
design and implementation is presented together with results of performance and
scalability studies. A typical LHC tracking study involves some 1500 jobs, each over
100,000 turns, requiring about 1 hour of CPU on a modern PC. A reliable and easy to
use Linux interface to the CPSS Web application has been provided. It has been used
for a production run of 15,000 jobs, using some 50 desktop Windows PCs, which
uncovered a numerical incompatibility between Windows 2000 and XP. It is expected
to make available up to two orders of magnitude more computing power for these
studies at zero cost.
Authors
A. Wagner
(CERN)
E.M. McIntosh
(CERN)
