Back in Canada for my second 3PGCIC conference – this time as coorganizer. A long flight followed by a small one and a taxi ride – I just managed to arrive in time to present my paper on REStful web services for distributed computing.
It was a short stay, but I took a walk around downtown Victoria, saw a few … Read the rest
My first ACAT conference – this year hosted by Brunel University. I presented a paper on my GUI for ATLAS data processing.
The topics of ACAT match very well what I’ve been doing both during my PhD days and alter – and I’ve been wanting to go for years, but never managed till now. Of course it’s … Read the rest
Recently I’ve stumbled upon the terms citizen science and citizen cyberscience. The last term was apparently invented by Shuttleworth Fellow Francois Grey as a label for BOINC-based distributed computing projects like seti@home, folding@home and his own lhc@home. Grey is also behind the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in Geneva – on the web pages of which there’s more information to be … Read the rest
As exemplified on the pictures above (from the photo gallery of one of the students), CERN School of Computing includes a good deal of extracurricular activities. Which probably goes a long way in explaining the good and humorous atmosphere in the classroom.
Having spent a lot of energy preparing the exercise with the great CSC team, it really was great … Read the rest
In this post I’ll try to explain the vision behind a software suite I wrote at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2009-11.
The ideas for the software arose from my dual involvement with the high energy physics and the e-science groups. Some of the code originated in previous projects, including distributed computing efforts of the ATLAS experiment at … Read the rest
In this exercise we’ll solve the same assignment as in exercise 1, but using a prepackaged GridPilot application.
pT diboson distribution.
This exercise was created for the 2011 CERN CERN School of Computing, hosted by the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.
Credits: physics content of this exercise by Jørgen Beck Hansen from the Niels Bohr Institute.
LHC Monte Carlo event generation and analysis
The original purpose of GridPilot was to make it easy for researchers to run, preserve, rerun, share computations on the emerging national and international grid infrastructures. The word infrastructure is used in plural here – indicating our failure to create the grid. Thus GridPilot was born with a pluggable backend support.
Eventually, I created my own take at a grid … Read the rest
In this post I’ll give an overview of the GridFactory software suite (including GridPilot) and provide the minimum information to get started as well as pointers to more thorough documentation.
GridFactory is a software suite composed of the following programs:
GridFactory server– Notice that currently the software has only been tested on Ubuntu-9.10, 10.04 and Fedora-12, 13 – i386*
– Notice also that you must first install SUN/Oracle’s Java (=1.6), either from a distribution repository or directly from Oracle.
Download mod_gacl, mod_gridfactory, gridfactory_server: either use your browser and get the files from
Dear grid warriors: new tools are now available to assist you in your battles. The GridFactory software suite, including GridPilot, is now available for download.
Supported platforms
GridPilot and GridWorker have been tested on the following platforms:
In this post I’ll report on running the application “mc09_7TeV.107691….” from the GridPilot app store. In the case of NorduGrid and WLCG, the ATLAS software is preinstalled on the resources. In the case of GridFactory, the jobs run inside a CernVM appliance with ATLAS software loaded through the AFS network file system. The input dataset consisted of 26 files totaling … Read the rest
In previous posts we saw that I/O bound jobs ran ~3 faster on standard SATA disks than on network file systems and block devices (GPFS, NFS, EBS). This post reports on CPU bound jobs. I ran standard ATLAS Monte Carlo simulation on both grid and cloud resources: imported the ATLAS simulation app and ran the default 100 small jobs, each … Read the rest
In this post, I’ll take a look at some more runs of the “atlas_d3pd_boildown” application available in the GridPilot app store. The difference w.r.t. the runs described in a previous post is that this time I ran on cloud as opposed to grid resources. On dedicated hardware and on two public clouds, Amazon’s EC2 and Cabo’s Irigo cloud, I … Read the rest
In this post, I’ll take a look at some runs of the POV-Ray application available in the GridPilot app store: To import this app, just choose “File → Import application”, navigate to the relevant folder and click “OK”.
This application is a bit more sophisticated than the one used for the simple benchmarking described in a previous post. Now, … Read the rest
This example is special in that it does not depend on any preinstalled software package (runtime environment), but includes a precompiled binary. This binary will of course only for certain run on the system it was compiled on. We compiled on Debian Sarge and Scientific Linux 5 and run on all back-ends: a local virtual machine, GridFactory without virtualization and … Read the rest
Here is a video I put together to demo how to use GridPilot to run computations on a GridFactory cluster:
Given the popularity of the iPhone, an interesting use of a batch system is conversion of movie files from the AVI to the MPG4 format. In this post I’ll explain 3 ways doing this with GridPilot. Which way you prefer will likely depend on the number and size of files you want to convert and the power … Read the rest
To gauge the performance of both GridFactory and virtualization layers in a high-CPU/low-throughput setting, we chose the standard ray-tracing program POV-Ray and a standard benchmarking image, shipped with the program.
This example is a fairly naive benchmarking exercise consisting simply in rendering the same image with POV-Ray 20 times. Each POV-Ray job used a … Read the rest
Plot of ATLAS data created with GridPilot from official datasets.
This example demonstrates the use of GridPilot in data processing in high energy physics (HEP). It makes extensive use of some HEP-specific technologies, that are incapsulated in GridPilot in the form of plugins: the ATLAS DB plugin and the NG and GLite computing system plugins. The jobs chosen are so-called … Read the rest
