Software developed by UB scientists streamlines the management of large-scale computing using commercial systems
Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (http://icc.ub.edu/) have developed DIRAC, a software package for managing high-power commercial computing systems that optimizes the use of large-scale resources. The software is already used to manage data processing in one of the main experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The aim of the DIRAC project - funded under the CPAN project of the National Centre for Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics as part of the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 program - is to develop the software's capability to manage the computing resources needed by users in all areas of the scientific community. The software has been successfully tested in simulations carried out as part of the Belle experiment (Japan), using 2,000 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) processors.
Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (http://icc.ub.edu/) have developed DIRAC, a software package for managing high-power commercial computing systems that optimizes the use of large-scale resources. The software is already used to manage data processing in one of the main experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The aim of the DIRAC project - funded under the CPAN project of the National Centre for Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics as part of the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 program - is to develop the software's capability to manage the computing resources needed by users in all areas of the scientific community. The software has been successfully tested in simulations carried out as part of the Belle experiment (Japan), using 2,000 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) processors.
DIRAC manages the execution of the data processing systems used in the Large Hadron Collider (LHCb) experiment to identify the different types of particles measured. It also controls the execution of the algorithms used to select the most relevant data from the huge volume recorded (10 million collisions are needed to reconstruct a single Beauty Particle, which provides a basis for the study of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe). DIRAC also distributes the results across the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), a network of more than 300 computing centres in 57 countries across the world, 120 of which contribute to the LHCb project, and retrieves the data required for post-experiment analysis. DIRAC is the result of a collaborative initiative between experts from the ICCUB and the University of Santiago de Compostela.beauty