Speaker
Dr
jan balewski
(MIT)
Description
In recent years, Cloud computing has become a very attractive “notion” and
popular model for accessing distributed resources and has emerged as the next
big trend after the so-called Grid computing approach.
The onsite STAR computing resources amounting to about 3000 CPU slots have
been extended by additional 1000 slots using opportunistic resources from pilot
DOE/Magellan and DOE/Nimbus projects.
The Virtual Machine (VM) framework was used to assemble the STAR-computing
environment, which is independent on specific hardware. STAR VM was
validated once, deployed on over 100 8-core VMs at NERSC and Argon National
Lab, and used as homogenous Virtual Farm processing in real time events
acquired by STAR detector located at Brookhaven National Lab. To provide time
dependent calibration constants to the large number of isolated VMs, a database
snapshot scheme was devised and used for this exercise. It allows periodic
synchronization of VM DB with the master DB without the need for frequent DB
client connections to the master DB from multiple jobs running on every VM. The
two high capacity disks localized at the opposite coasts of US and interconnected
via Globus-Online protocol were used in this setup, which resulted with highly
scalable Cloud-based extension of STAR computing resources.
The STAR Virtual Farm scaled up between February and May of 2011 from 160
to 1300 CPU slots. It has been used to process fraction of events STAR in real
time and later to reanalyze past STAR events to providing key arguments for
changing the course of ongoing STAR data taking
Author
Dr
jan balewski
(MIT)
