Secure and efficient high-performance PROOF-based cluster system for high-energy physics

Abstract

The particle detectors at the LHC produced about 25 PB data in a year, and the total size of data recorded on tape media at the CERN data center reached almost 100 PB in 2013. In order to preserve such a large-scale data safely and process them fast and efficiently, the collaboration of the data centers around the world (WLCG) was founded. The overall performance of the WLCG has strong site-dependency, and the time scale for the result is unpredictable. In this paper, we introduce PROOF developed for providing high performance and reliable environment for the user analysis task to complement the grid computing, and we provide a new Linux cluster (KIAF), by deploying PROOF. The KIAF cluster provides data access in low latency and secure connection with the clients. In order to find the correlation between the processing performance and the scalability of KIAF, we perform a simple analysis task counting the number of particles in the data on KIAF by varying the number of worker nodes from 1 to 96. We show that the linear scalability of performance of KIAF and its limitation as a function of the number of workers participating in processing.