"Evolution of the Internet" Powers Massive LHC Grid

jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the computer network supporting CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will begin smashing particles into one another later this year. We've discussed some of the impressive capabilities of this network in the past. "Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a 'parallel Internet.' Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the US infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an 'evolution of the Internet.' New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network"

Comments

Re:Waste of good fiber.

[TubeSteak]

You'd think our /. Overlords would gin up a filter to block the posting of google & yahoo redirects.

There's really no reason to use redirects or tinyurl on /.

The question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...did it have a "Vista capable" sticker?

Re:All that and we still have no anti-gravity

[Jugalator]

You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity, alter the strong force or increase the weak. So go invent your own universe where the laws of physics are cheaper to alter. ;)

But does it run...

[RiotingPacifist]

Oh wait ofc it does, youve basically got science which is fundamentally open source.
Then youve got a bunch of scientists who are fundamentally geeks
And its all being setup in Europe, which isnt as under the grip of MS

As a bonus
They need to ability to look back and explain all their analysis which means they have to see the source
It costs a hell of a lot to get the data so they dont want to loose any data anywhere.
They have a lot of results to analyse so they dont want to be waiting for the server to come back on-line.
Could they of gone with BSD? probably, but most science tools are developed for linux.

Some Realtime

[Roger W Moore]

Actually not all of it is offline. One of the things I have a research grant for is to develop a realtime remote farm for monitoring the detector. This is to catch subtle detector problems quickly before we end up collecting 2 weeks of useless data.

For the Tier 1 a significant fraction of the data is raw 'sensor' (we call it detector) data. This allows reconstruction program converts the data into physics objects like electrons, muons, jets etc.) to be rerun on the data once bugs in the initial reconstruction program have been fixed.

Intelligent Design of the Internet?

[OshMan]

Perhaps we should give equal time to an alternate post about the Intelligent Design of the Internet.

How do you know this?

[Roger W Moore]

You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity

How do you know this? One possibility is that there are more that 3 space dimensions. If this is the case AND the LHC has enough energy to access them we could well end up being able to study quantum gravity at the LHC. This might not give is flying cars but in order to first utilize something it is neccessary to understand it.

Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...

It depends on what you think the goals of physics are. As a physicist myself I would define them as "to understand how the Universe works". While we still have a long way to go physics has by no means been a failure in that regard. We understand far more about how the Universe works than we did 50 or 100 years ago. Whether or not we can produce flying cars or fusion reactors depends on HOW the Universe works. To say that physics is a failure because these things are extremely hard to produce would be like saying that Columbus' expedition was a total failure because he didn't get to India. You cannot complain physics is a failure just because the Universe does not work the way that YOU want it to - we study the laws of physics, we don't get to make them.....although it would be interesting if we could!

You can help too

[Danathar]

What a lot of people don't know is that if you want to join a cluster to the Open Science Grid and you are a legit organization more than likely they would let you join. Just be sure you understand your responsibilities as it's more of an active participation. If you are a school or computer user group/club go to the open science grid website and start reading up.

Warning: Although not for this crowd. Joining OSG (http://www.opensciencegrid.org/) is a bit more complicated than loading up BOINC or folding@home. It requires a stack of middleware that is distributed as part of OSG's software. Most of the sites I believe use Condor (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/). If you would like to get Condor up and running quick the best way is using ROCKS (http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/) with a Rocks Condor "Roll" (jargon for Rocks condor cluster). Then after getting your condor flock up and running you can load the Open Science Grid stuff on it.

I'm currently running a small cluster of PC's that were destined to be excessed (P4's 3 or 4 years old) and have seen jobs come in and process on my computers! And...to boot you can configure BOINC to act as a backfill mechanism so that when the systems are not running jobs from OSG they can be running BOINC and whatever project you've joined through that project.

BTW...all of the software mentioned is funded under grants from the National Science Foundation - primarily via the Office of CyberInfrastructure but some through other Directorates within NSF.

Re:You can help too

[wart]

'active' is a bit of an understatement. You need to be willing to provide long term support for the resources that you volunteer to the OSG, including frequent upgrades of the OSG middleware. A resource that joins the OSG for 3 months and then leaves is not going to provide much benefit to the larger OSG community.

It's also not for the faint of heart. While the OSG software installation process has gotten much better over the last couple of years, it still takes several hours for an experienced admin to get a new site up and running, and that's assuming you already have your cluster and batch system (such as Condor or PBS) already configured correctly. If you are new to the OSG, then it is likely to take a week or more before your site is ready for outside use.

Our organization has found that it takes at least one full time admin to manage a medium-sized OSG cluster (~100 PCs), though you can probably get away with less effort for a smaller cluster.

This isn't meant to be criticism against the OSG; I think they've done great work in building up a grid infrastructure in the US. I just want to emphasize that supporting a OSG cluster is a non-trivial effort.

Tech/$/second gt Science/$/second

[xPsi]

Practically speaking, trickle-down technology of the sort mentioned in the article is one of the main reasons basic research on this massive scale even has a chance of getting funded with taxpayer dollars. Looking for the Higgs, supersymmetry, and a color glass condensate is cool (important!) scientifically, but it is hard to justify spending 10 billion dollars without some pragmatic output. I'm a high energy physicist by training and would like to think these projects could get funded on their own scientific merit, but I suspect funding agencies would disagree; regardless, technology offshoots of this sort are definitely a good thing.