Speaker
Philippe Galvez
(California Institute of Technology (CALTECH))
Description
The EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations) system is based on a new distributed and unique architecture, leveraging the 10+ years of unique experience of developing and operating large distributed production based collaboration systems. The primary objective being to provide to the High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments a system/service that meet their unique requirements of usability, quality, scalability, reliability, and cost necessary for nationally and globally distributed research organizations.
The EVO system, which will be officially released during June 2007 includes a
better-integrated and more convenient user interface, a richer feature set including higher resolution video and instant messaging, greater adaptability to all platforms and operating systems, and higher overall operational efficiency and robustness. All of these aspects will be particularly important as we are entering the startup period of the LHC because the community will require an unprecedented level of daily collaboration. There will be intense demand for long distance scheduled meetings, person-to-person communication, group-to-group discussions, broadcast meetings, workshops and continuous presence at important locations such as control rooms and experimental areas. The need to have the collaboration tools totally integrated in the physicists’ working environments will gain great importance.
Beyond all these user-features, another key enhancement is the collaboration
infrastructure network created by EVO, which covers the entire globe and which is
fully redundant and resilient to failure. The EVO infrastructure automatically adapts
to the prevailing network configuration and status, so as to ensure that the
collaboration service runs without disruption. Because we are able to monitor the
end-user’s node, we are able to inform the user of any potential or arising problems (e.g. excessive CPU load or packet loss) and, where possible, to fix the problems automatically and transparently on behalf of the user (e.g. by switching to another server node in the network, by reducing the number of video streams received, et cetera). The integration of the MonALISA architecture into this new EVO architecture was an important step in the evolution of the service towards a globally distributed dynamic system that is largely autonomous.
The EVO system is now the primary collaboration system used by the LHC and more generally by High Energy and Nuclear Physics community going forward.
Author
Philippe Galvez
(California Institute of Technology (CALTECH))
Co-author
Prof.
Harvey Newman
(California Institute of Technology (CALTECH))
