21–25 May 2012
New York City, NY, USA
US/Eastern timezone

The WorkQueue project - a task queue for the CMS workload management system

22 May 2012, 13:30
4h 45m
Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor) (Kimmel Center)

Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor)

Kimmel Center

Parallel Distributed Processing and Analysis on Grids and Clouds (track 3) Poster Session

Speaker

Dr Stuart Wakefield (Imperial College London)

Description

We present the development and first experience of a new component (termed WorkQueue) in the CMS workload management system. This component provides a link between a global request system (Request Manager) and agents (WMAgents) which process requests at compute and storage resources (known as sites). These requests typically consist of creation or processing of a data sample (possibly terabytes in size). Unlike the standard concept of a task queue, the WorkQueue does not contain fully resolved work units (known typically as jobs in HEP). This would require the WorkQueue to run computationally heavy algorithms that are better suited to run in the WMAgents. Instead the request specifies an algorithm that the WorkQueue uses to split the request into reasonable size chunks (known as elements). An advantage of performing lazy evaluation of an element is that expanding datasets can be accommodated by having job details resolved as late as possible. The WorkQueue architecture consists of a global WorkQueue which obtains requests from the request system, expands them and forms an element ordering based on the request priority. Each WMAgent contains a local WorkQueue which buffers work close to the agent, this overcomes temporary unavailability of the global WorkQueue and reduces latency for an agent to begin processing. Elements are pulled from the global WorkQueue to the local WorkQueue and into the WMAgent based on the estimate of the amount of work within the element and the resources available to the agent. WorkQueue is based on CouchDB, a document oriented no-sql database. WorkQueue uses the features of CouchDB (map/reduce views, bi-directional replication between distributed instances) to provide a scalable distributed system for managing large queues of work. The project described here represents an improvement over the old approach to workload management in CMS which involved individual operators feeding requests into agents. This new approach allows for a system where individual WMAgents are transient and can be added or removed from the system as needed.

Summary

We present the development and first experience of a new component (termed WorkQueue) in the CMS workload management system. This component provides a link between a global request system (Request Manager) and agents (WMAgents) which process requests at compute and storage resources (known as sites). These requests typically consist of creation or processing of a data sample (possibly terabytes in size).

WorkQueue is based on CouchDB, a document oriented no-sql database. WorkQueue uses the features of CouchDB (map/reduce views, bi-directional replication between distributed instances) to provide a scalable distributed system for managing large queues of work.

The project described here represents an improvement over the old approach to workload management in CMS which involved individual operators feeding requests into agents. This new approach allows for a system where individual WMAgents are transient and can be added or removed from the system as needed.

Student? Enter 'yes'. See http://goo.gl/MVv53 no

Authors

Seangchan Ryu (Fermilab) Dr Stuart Wakefield (Imperial College London)

Co-authors

Dr Dave Evans (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Mr Matthew Norman (University of California at San Diego) Simon Metson (University of Bristol (GB)) Stephen Foulkes (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (Fermilab)) Zdenek Maxa (California Institute of Technology (US))

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.