Abstract
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to enter its third run at unprecedented energies. The experiments at the LHC face computational challenges with enormous data volumes that need to be analysed by thousands of physics users. The ATLAS EventIndex project, currently running in production, builds a complete catalogue of particle collisions, or events, for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The distributed nature of the experiment data model is exploited by running jobs at over one hundred Grid data centers worldwide. Millions of files with petabytes of data are indexed, extracting a small quantity of metadata per event, that is conveyed with a data collection system in real time to a central Hadoop instance at CERN. After a successful first implementation based on a messaging system, some issues suggested performance bottlenecks for the challenging higher rates in next runs of the experiment. In this work we characterize the weaknesses of the previous messaging system, regarding complexity, scalability, performance and resource consumption. A new approach based on an object-based storage method was designed and implemented, taking into account the lessons learned and leveraging the ATLAS experience with this kind of systems. We present the experiment that we run during three months in the real production scenario worldwide, in order to evaluate the messaging and object store approaches. The results of the experiment show that the new object-based storage method can efficiently support large-scale data collection for big data environments like the next runs of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by MICINN in Spain under grants FPA2016-75141-C2-1-R, PID2109-104301RB-C21 and TIN2015-66972-C5-5-R, which include FEDER funds from the European Union. This work was done as part of the databases applications research and development programme of the ATLAS Collaboration, and we thank the collaboration for its support and cooperation.
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Fernández Casaní, Á., Orduña, J.M., Sánchez, J. et al. A Reliable Large Distributed Object Store Based Platform for Collecting Event Metadata. J Grid Computing 19, 39 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-021-09580-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-021-09580-0