GridX1
is a national computational Grid Canada project
bringing together researchers from the Universities
of Alberta, Calgary, Simon Fraser and Victoria together
with the TRIUMF Laboratory in Vancouver, the National
Research Council in Ottawa and CANARIE.
GridX1 exploits large research computing facilities
at the Centre for Subatomic
Research at the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
the National Research Council Research Computing
Support Group in Ottawa, the
University of Victoria Research Computing Facility
and the large WestGrid cluster at the University of British Columbia. The
sites are connected by the high-speed research national
network provided by CANARIE together with the provincial
research network providers (BCNET, NETERA and ORION).
GridX1 is now part of the largest international
Grid project in the world based at the CERN Laboratory
in Geneva. The LHC Grid Project (LCG) is a
global Grid project that is being built to analyze
the vast amounts of data that will be produced by
its next particle accelerator, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC). Researchers
from across Canada are playing a key role the ATLAS
particle physics experiment at the LHC. When the
LHC starts operation in 2007, it is expected that
many Petabytes of data
storage and tens of thousands of today's high performance
PC's will be required in order to sift through the
data, looking for new particles that can provide
clues to the origins of our Universe.
The LHC Computing Grid began operation in September
2003, and today has some 80 sites worldwide (including
Canada) contributing substantial computing resources.
This Grid infrastructure is being used to
successfully process particle physics data, demonstrating
the viability of a global computing Grid for tackling
the enormous data samples.
The GridX1 Project makes the Canadian computing
facilities appear as a single resource in the CERN
LHC Grid. The link to the LHC Grid is housed at
TRIUMF, where computers monitor and control jobs
that are sent to the Canadian Grid. These computers
advertise the availability of the combined GridX1
resources, thus CERN knows when any GridX1 site
can accept new jobs. When a user at CERN submits
a job to TRIUMF, the system ensures that the user
has authorization to use GridX1, and then sends
the job to the next available site on GridX1.
The interface between the CERN LHC Grid and GridX1
is a unique demonstration of the interplay between
two different computing Grids.
GridX1
and its interface to the LHC Grid was constructed
using proven software such as the Condor-G task
broker. Currently applications simulating
the collision of very high-energy particle collisions
are running on the Canadian Grid. To-date well over
2000 jobs have been successfully run on GridX1.
Grid Canada :
http://www.gridcanada.ca
GridX1 Project :
http://www.grid.phys.uvic.ca/gridX1)
CERN
:
http://intranet.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
ATLAS Experiment: http://atlasexperiment.org/
LCG Project :
http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/
Condor-G
:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/condorg/
Contacts:
Randall Sobie
Institute of Particle Physics and University of
Victoria
(rsobie@uvic.ca)
Roger Impey
NRC Institute for Information Technology
(roger.impey@nrc.ca)
Gabriel Mateescu NRC Research
Computing Support Group
(gabriel.mateescu@nrc.ca)
Mike Vetterli
Simon Fraser University and TRIUMF
(vetm@triumf.ca)
Bryan Caron Centre
for Subatomic Research, University of Alberta
(caron@phys.ualberta.ca)
