Speaker
Describe the activity, tool or service using or enhancing the EGEE infrastructure or results. A high-level description is needed here (Neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references is required).
The ALICE collaboration (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the CERN LHC
will collect data at a rate of 2PB/year and use several MSI2K computing
units to process and analyse them. The storage and CPU power is
distributed at more than 65 computing centres worldwide, unified by the
Grid hardware and software infrastructure.
AliEn (Alice Environment) is a set of top-level Grid services, used by all
members of the ALICE collaboration as an unique entry point to the Grid.
Describe the added value of the grid for your activity, or the value your tool or service adds for other grid users. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community, and the relevance for other scientific or business applications.
The services provided by AliEn include common job task queue, file catalogue,
authentication and authorization services, data management utilities and
APIservice for user access.
Various Grid flavours (EGGE, OSG, ARC) workload and data management
systems are accessed throug interfaces, thus hiding from the user the
heterogenous environment exposed by the different Grids.
Although originally developed for ALICE, AliEn has proven to be
a very versatile and robust Grid implementation and has been adopted by
other virtual organizations.
Report on the impact of the activity, tool or service. This should include a description of how grid technology enabled or enhanced the result, or how you have enabled or enhanced the infrastructure for other users.
AliEn is in production since 2002 and over the years has been used for
large scale Monte-Carlo data production, and since 2006 for user analysis
and RAW data production of test beam and cosmics data from the ALICE
detector.
This contribution will present the latest developments in AliEn, including
the multi-VO interface, job splitting and prioritization and
data replication tools.
