Communications of the ACM
Frontier Guides Computing Through the Collision Landscape
The ATLAS particle accelerator experiment at CERN is using Frontier software to help scientists distribute information needed to interpret collision data.
Credit: ATLAS Experiment / CERN
Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) working on the CMS and ATLAS particle detector experiments are using a software system that helps scientists quickly distribute information needed to interpret collision data. The system, called Frontier, is based on Squid Web cache technology. "Since data is often shared between sites or pulled from a remote site, the speed of data return is critical," says U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory engineer John DeStefano.
Fermilab computer scientists Jim Kowalkowski and Marc Paterno devised the original idea for Frontier. A Frontier server takes information about the changing landscape of a particle detector from a database and sends it to other servers, which then caches the information and shares it with other computers. Frontier uses HTTP to send database requests out to servers. The system has been updated to save more time and computing power by skipping the step of reloading information if the detector maps have not been changed.
From International Science Grid This Week
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2010 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
No entries found