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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
CERN OPENLAB ADDS NEW DIMENSION TO GRID COMPUTING
The CERN openlab for DataGrid applications, a partnership between CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research and five leading IT companies -–
Enterasys Networks, HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle –- has announced a series of
server and storage technical results regarding the first global science Grid
–- the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid project, LCG. The announcement was
made at the recent annual sponsors meeting of the CERN openlab.
The openlab partners have demonstrated that a cluster of 40 HP servers running
64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors can be successfully integrated with the LCG,
which involves more than 60 major scientific computing centres in Europe,
North America and Asia. The openlab partners have also completed intensive
testing of IBM's SAN File System to demonstrate scale-out capabilities of the
new storage software.
With this landmark addition of servers, the openlab partners have proven that
the LCG, otherwise based on 32-bit processors, can be extended to a truly
heterogeneous computing environment. This is crucial for the future evolution
of this Grid, as it must grow rapidly in capacity and power to prepare for the
tremendous data storage and analysis requirements of CERN's Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) project. The LHC is expected to produce some 15 petabytes of
data per year after it is switched on in 2007. Thousands of physicists will
sift through this data for years to come, analysing it for tell-tale signs of
new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the early origins of
our Universe.
The CERN openlab, a three-year industrial cooperation formally launched in
January 2003, marked its halfway mark at the annual sponsors meeting on June
22, and has already tallied a number of impressive technical results.
Together, the partners have built the CERN opencluster, a state-of-the-art
system for testing prototype Grid applications of increasing power and
functionality. The open, collaborative environment of the partnership places
an emphasis on a common development programme for data-intensive Grid
computing based on open standards. This includes a 28TB high-end storage
system and advanced storage management software, supplied by IBM,
state-of-the-art switching and routing equipment from Enterasys Networks, and
the advanced, Grid-enabled Oracle Database 10g.
CERN's director general, Robert Aymar, described the contribution of the CERN
openlab as being of crucial importance to the LHC project. Looking ahead, he
noted that, "The CERN openlab provides a role model for how CERN and its
academic partners may in future wish to organise collaboration between the
private and public sector, in order to develop the many new technologies that
will surely be needed for endeavours beyond the LHC. As the results so far
show, CERN openlab has effectively established a framework for collaboration
between multiple industrial partners, in a pre-competitive spirit and based on
open standards."
Other key results obtained with the CERN opencluster include a data challenge
where storage-to-tape rates of over 1GB per second were maintained for hours,
corresponding to the maximum rates at which data from the LHC will need to be
stored to a primary tape backup. The high-speed switching environment
sponsored by Enterasys Networks played a crucial role in that result. Also,
some of the HP server nodes with Intel Itanium 2 dual processors contributed
to the Internet2 landspeed record that was set last October by CERN and
partner Caltech, during Telecom 2, which demonstrated the rate –- more than
1TB in 30 minutes –- at which data from the LHC will need to be distributed to
the LCG's so-called Tier-1 centres around the globe, for local storage and
analysis.
Additionally, the researchers completed breakthrough testing on IBM's Storage
Tank storage management technology, which is used in IBM's latest storage
software product the IBM TotalStorage SAN File System. The software is
designed without inherent limitations on the amount of storage that can be
supported. The project recently managed more than 100 simultaneous SAN File
System clients and over 28TB of storage distributed among 10 storage servers.
These tests measured data rates exceeding the initial expectations from CERN.
Recently, Oracle-sponsored researchers in the CERN openlab managed to increase
the availability of CERN's Grid computing environment by significantly
reducing downtime of its catalogue, whose job is to ensure correct mapping of
filenames and file IDs and identified a way to upgrade an Oracle database from
one release to another whilst keeping the database operational. Both results
represent new ways to use existing technology to address the challenges of
Grid-based computing.
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