9–13 Jul 2018
Sofia, Bulgaria
Europe/Sofia timezone

Backfilling the Grid with Containerized BOINC in the ATLAS computing

11 Jul 2018, 11:45
15m
Hall 10 (National Palace of Culture)

Hall 10

National Palace of Culture

presentation Track 7 – Clouds, virtualization and containers T7 - Clouds, virtualization and containers

Speaker

Wenjing Wu (Computer Center, IHEP, CAS)

Description

Virtualization is a commonly used solution for utilizing the opportunistic computing resources in the HEP field, as it provides an unified software and OS layer that the HEP computing tasks require over the heterogeneous opportunistic computing resources. However there is always performance penalty with virtualization, especially for short jobs which are always the case for volunteer computing tasks, the overhead of virtualization becomes a big portion in the wall time, hence it leads to low CPU efficiency of the jobs. With the wide usage of containers in HEP computing, we explore the possibility of adopting the container technology into the ATLAS BOINC project, hence we implemented a Native version in BOINC, which uses the singularity container or direct usage of the target OS to replace VirtualBox. In this paper, we will discuss 1) the implementation and workflow of the Native version in the ATLAS BOINC ; 2) the performance measurement of the Native version comparing to the previous Virtualization version. 3) the limits and shortcomings of the Native version; 4) The use case and harvest of the Native version which includes using it in backfilling the ATLAS Grid Tier2 sites and other clusters, and using it to utilize the idle computers from the CERN computing centre.

Primary authors

Wenjing Wu (Computer Center, IHEP, CAS) David Cameron (University of Oslo (NO)) Andrej Filipcic (Jozef Stefan Institute (SI))

Presentation materials