Speaker
Mr
Michael DePhillips
(BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY)
Description
Database demands resulting from offline analysis and production of data at
The STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion
Collider has
steadily increased over the last 6 years of data taking activities. With each year
STAR more than doubles events taken with an anticipation of reaching a billion event
capabilities as early as next year. The challenges faced from producing and analyzing
this magnitude of events have raised issues with regard to distribution of
calibrations and geometry data, via databases, to STAR's growing global
collaboration. Rapid distribution, availability, ensured synchronization and load
balancing have become paramount considerations. Both conventional technology and
novel approaches are used in parallel to realize these goals.
This paper discusses how STAR uses distribution methods via MySQL master slave
replication to distribute its databases; the synchronization issues that arise from
this type of distribution and solutions, mostly homegrown, put forth to overcome
these issues. Also discussed is a novel approach toward load balancing between slave
nodes that assists in maintaining a high availability rate for a veracious community.
This load balancing addresses both, pools of nodes internal to given location, as
well as balancing the load for remote users between different available locations.
Challenges, trade-offs, rationale for decisions and paths forward will be discussed in
all cases, presenting a solid production environment with a vision for scalable growth.
| Submitted on behalf of Collaboration (ex, BaBar, ATLAS) | STAR |
|---|
Authors
Dr
Jerome LAURET
(BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY)
Mr
Michael DePhillips
(BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY)
Dr
Mikhail KOPYTINE
(Kent State University, USA)
