Trip Report SC’04 PittsburghNov 6-12

Fons Rademakers

Super Computing Conferences

• Large conference, more than 6000 attendees.• Very large exhibit, all major and not so major vendors

showing their latest high performance products.• All major US and many European and Asian labs had

stands on the exhibit floor– Fermi, SLAC, BNL, LBL, Argonne, many Universities, etc.

• No explicit CERN presence.• We have now attended the last three SC conferences,

the last two we demoed the ALICE/PROOF/AliEn/gLite analysis system on the HP stand.

• We did not attend the technical program, we gave many demos, talked to a lot of people, got many good ideas and feedback, and wandered over the large exhibit.

Timeline

• Nov 5:Visit to Pittsburgh Super Computing

Center• Nov 6 - 7:

Sightseeing and arrival of rest of team• Nov 8:

Setting up demo at HP booth• Nov 9 - 11:

Running demos

The HP Grid Team

Derek Feichtinger

Fons Rademakers

Andreas Peters

Federico Carminati

Matevs Tadel

Predrag Buncic

Other Incognito Appearances

• Wolfgang von Rueden - Fermilab

• Sverre Jarp - FermiLab

• David Foster - Caltech

Nov 5: Visit to PSC

On the steps of the Mellon Institute, which houses the PSC.

Nov 5: Visit to PSC

Federico Carminati in discussion with Mike Levine (left), scientific director of PSC and his associates.

Nov 5: Visit to PSC

Mike Levine and Frederico Carminati in front of “Ben”, PSC’s 64 node Compaq Alphaserver system, each node is a 4 processor SMP with 4 GB of memory.

Summary PSC

• Large amount of expensive hardware:– Ben: 64 Compaq Alphaserver nodes, each node is a 4 CPU

SMP with 4 GB RAM– Lemieux: 750 Compaq Alphaserver ES45 nodes and two

separate front end nodes. Each computational node is a 4 CPU SMP with 4 GB RAM running Tru64. A Quadrics interconnection network connects the nodes.

– Red Storm from Cray (2005): 2000 AMD Opteron processors with a peak performance of 10 TFlops running Linux. [A 10000 node, 40 TFlops, Red Storm has already been installed at Sandia].

– LambaRail: next generation 30 Gb WAN. Multiple networks exists side-by-side in the same fiber-optic cable, but are independent, each supported by its own lightwave (lambda).

Summary PSC

• Most jobs running at PSC use a large number of CPU’s in parallel. On Lemieux more than 50% of all jobs used more than 1024 CPU’s in parallel (mainly biomedical and meteorological codes).

• PROOF would be an interesting candidate to run on >1024 nodes.

• But there is little interest to provide cycles for many single CPU batch reconstruction or analysis jobs.

Sightseeing

Derby between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

The SC’04 Exhibit

Small part of the SC’04 exhibit floor.

Nov 8: Setting Up the Demo

Checking the demo machine.

Nov 9-11: Running Demos

Predrag and Derek giving a demo.

Trends Seen at the Exhibit• Sun showing their nice new AMD Opteron machines running Solaris

10.• Cray showing Opteron based Red Storm components.• SGI is betting the shop on Itanium, very nice graphics demos.• AMD showed the first running multi-core CPU.• Opteron is clearly the CPU of the year.• Linux is clearly the SC OS of choice, Windows only seen on the

Microsoft booth.• Lots of management and monitoring software.• SLAC showed xrootd as a fail safe file server.• FermiLab showed PEAC, PROOF Enabled Analysis Cluster.• Of course everybody had a Grid solution (even a dual CPU machine

is now a problem asking for a Grid solution).

Our Demo

• Demonstrated the feasibility of global distributed parallel interactive data analysis.

• Used 14 sites, each running 4 PROOF workers, i.e. 52 CPU’s in parallel.

• Used ALICE MC data that had been produced at these sites during our PDC’04.

• Made a realistic analysis using the ALICE ESD objects.

• Used the AliRoot, ROOT, PROOF, and gLite technologies.

Forward Proxy

Forward Proxy

RootdProofd

Grid/Root Authentication

Grid Access Control Service

TGrid UI/Queue UI

Proofd Startup

PROOFPROOFClientClient

PROOFPROOFMasterMaster

Slave Registration/ Booking- DB

Site <X>

PROOF PROOF SLAVE SLAVE SERVERSSERVERS

Site APROOF PROOF SLAVE SLAVE

SERVERSSERVERS

Site B LCG

PROOFPROOFSteerSteer

Master Setup

New Elements

Grid Service Interfaces

Grid File/Metadata Catalogue

Client retrieves listof logical file (LFN + MSN)

Booking Requestwith logical file names

“Standard” Proof Session

Slave portsmirrored onMaster host

Optional Site Gateway

Master

ClientGrid-Middleware independend PROOF Setup

Only outgoing connectivity