BigPanDA monitoring is a web application that provides various processing and representation of the Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) system objects states. Analysing hundreds of millions ...of computation entities, such as an event or a job, BigPanDA monitoring builds different scales and levels of abstraction reports in real time mode. Provided information allows users to drill down into the reason of a concrete event failure or observe the broad picture such as tracking the computation nucleus and satellites performance or the progress of a whole production campaign. PanDA system was originally developed for the ATLAS experiment. Currently, it manages execution of more than 2 million jobs distributed over 170 computing centers worldwide on daily basis. BigPanDA is its core component commissioned in the middle of 2014 and now is the primary source of information for ATLAS users about the state of their computations and the source of decision support information for shifters, operators and managers. In this work, we describe the evolution of the architecture, current status and plans for the development of the BigPanDA monitoring.
The Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) system has been developed to meet ATLAS production and analysis requirements for a data-driven workload management system capable of operating at the ...Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data processing scale. Heterogeneous resources used by the ATLAS experiment are distributed worldwide at hundreds of sites, thousands of physicists analyse the data remotely, the volume of processed data is beyond the exabyte scale, dozens of scientific applications are supported, while data processing requires more than a few billion hours of computing usage per year. PanDA performed very well over the last decade including the LHC Run 1 data taking period. However, it was decided to upgrade the whole system concurrently with the LHC's first long shutdown in order to cope with rapidly changing computing infrastructure. After two years of reengineering efforts, PanDA has embedded capabilities for fully dynamic and flexible workload management. The static batch job paradigm was discarded in favor of a more automated and scalable model. Workloads are dynamically tailored for optimal usage of resources, with the brokerage taking network traffic and forecasts into account. Computing resources are partitioned based on dynamic knowledge of their status and characteristics. The pilot has been re-factored around a plugin structure for easier development and deployment. Bookkeeping is handled with both coarse and fine granularities for efficient utilization of pledged or opportunistic resources. An in-house security mechanism authenticates the pilot and data management services in off-grid environments such as volunteer computing and private local clusters. The PanDA monitor has been extensively optimized for performance and extended with analytics to provide aggregated summaries of the system as well as drill-down to operational details. There are as well many other challenges planned or recently implemented, and adoption by non-LHC experiments such as bioinformatics groups successfully running Paleomix (microbial genome and metagenomes) payload on supercomputers. In this paper we will focus on the new and planned features that are most important to the next decade of distributed computing workload management.
The second generation of the ATLAS Production System called ProdSys2 is a distributed workload manager that runs daily hundreds of thousands of jobs, from dozens of different ATLAS specific ...workflows, across more than hundred heterogeneous sites. It achieves high utilization by combining dynamic job definition based on many criteria, such as input and output size, memory requirements and CPU consumption, with manageable scheduling policies and by supporting different kind of computational resources, such as GRID, clouds, supercomputers and volunteer-computers. The system dynamically assigns a group of jobs (task) to a group of geographically distributed computing resources. Dynamic assignment and resources utilization is one of the major features of the system, it didn't exist in the earliest versions of the production system where Grid resources topology was predefined using national or/and geographical pattern. Production System has a sophisticated job fault-recovery mechanism, which efficiently allows to run multi-Terabyte tasks without human intervention. We have implemented "train" model and open-ended production which allow to submit tasks automatically as soon as new set of data is available and to chain physics groups data processing and analysis with central production by the experiment. We present an overview of the ATLAS Production System and its major components features and architecture: task definition, web user interface and monitoring. We describe the important design decisions and lessons learned from an operational experience during the first year of LHC Run2. We also report the performance of the designed system and how various workflows, such as data (re)processing, Monte-Carlo and physics group production, users analysis, are scheduled and executed within one production system on heterogeneous computing resources.
Contemporary scientific experiments produce significant amount of data as well as scientific publications based on this data. Since volumes of both are constantly increasing, it becomes more and more ...problematic to establish a connection between a given paper and the underlying data. However, such an association is one of the crucial pieces of information for performing various tasks, such as validating the scientific results presented in paper, comparing different approaches to deal with a problem or even simply understanding the situation in some area of science. Authors of this paper are working under the Data Knowledge Base (DKB) R&D project, initiated in 2016 to solve this issue for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. This project is aimed at developing of the software environment, providing the storage and a coherent representation of the basic information objects. In this paper authors present a metadata model developed for the ATLAS experiment, the architecture of the DKB system and its main components. Special attention is paid to the Kafka-based ETL subsystem implementation and mechanism for extraction of meta-information from the texts of ATLAS publications
The PanDA (Production and Distributed Analysis) workload management system was developed to meet the scale and complexity of distributed computing for the ATLAS experiment. PanDA managed resources ...are distributed worldwide, on hundreds of computing sites, with thousands of physicists accessing hundreds of Petabytes of data and the rate of data processing already exceeds Exabyte per year. While PanDA currently uses more than 200,000 cores at well over 100 Grid sites, future LHC data taking runs will require more resources than Grid computing can possibly provide. Additional computing and storage resources are required. Therefore ATLAS is engaged in an ambitious program to expand the current computing model to include additional resources such as the opportunistic use of supercomputers. In this paper we will describe a project aimed at integration of ATLAS Production System with Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Current approach utilizes modified PanDA Pilot framework for job submission to Titan's batch queues and local data management, with lightweight MPI wrappers to run single node workloads in parallel on Titan's multi-core worker nodes. It provides for running of standard ATLAS production jobs on unused resources (backfill) on Titan. The system already allowed ATLAS to collect on Titan millions of core-hours per month, execute hundreds of thousands jobs, while simultaneously improving Titans utilization efficiency. We will discuss the details of the implementation, current experience with running the system, as well as future plans aimed at improvements in scalability and efficiency. Notice: This manuscript has been authored, by employees of Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The publisher by accepting the manuscript for publication acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes.
The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has a complex heterogeneous distributed computing infrastructure, which is used to process and analyse exabytes of data. Metadata are collected and ...stored at all stages of data processing and physics analysis. All metadata could be divided into operational metadata to be used for the quasi on-line monitoring, and archival to study the behaviour of corresponding systems over a given period of time (i.e. long-term data analysis). Ensuring the stability and efficiency of complex and large-scale systems, such as those in the ATLAS Computing, requires sophisticated monitoring tools, and the long-term monitoring data analysis becomes as important as the monitoring itself. Archival metadata, which contains a lot of metrics (hardware and software environment descriptions, network states, application parameters, errors) accumulated for more than a decade, can be successfully processed by various machine learning (ML) algorithms for classification, clustering and dimensionality reduction. However, the ML data analysis, despite the massive use, is not without shortcomings: the underlying algorithms are usually treated as "black boxes", as there are no effective techniques for understanding their internal mechanisms. As a result, the data analysis suffers from the lack of human supervision. Moreover, sometimes the conclusions made by algorithms may not be making sense with regard to the real data model. In this work we will demonstrate how the interactive data visualization can be applied to extend the routine ML data analysis methods. Visualization allows an active use of human spatial thinking to identify new tendencies and patterns found in the collected data, avoiding the necessity of struggling with the instrumental analytics tools. The architecture and the corresponding prototype of Interactive Visual Explorer (InVEx) - visual analytics toolkit for the multidimensional data analysis of ATLAS computing metadata will be presented. The web-application part of the prototype provides an interactive visual clusterization of ATLAS computing jobs, search for computing jobs non-trivial behaviour and its possible reasons.
The paper describes the implementation of a high-performance system for the processing and analysis of log files for the PanDA infrastructure of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider ...(LHC), responsible for the workload management of order of 2M daily jobs across the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. The solution is based on the ELK technology stack, which includes several components: Filebeat, Logstash, ElasticSearch (ES), and Kibana. Filebeat is used to collect data from logs. Logstash processes data and export to Elasticsearch. ES are responsible for centralized data storage. Accumulated data in ES can be viewed using a special software Kibana. These components were integrated with the PanDA infrastructure and replaced previous log processing systems for increased scalability and usability. The authors will describe all the components and their configuration tuning for the current tasks, the scale of the actual system and give several real-life examples of how this centralized log processing and storage service is used to showcase the advantages for daily operations.
The development of the Interactive Visual Explorer (InVEx), a visual analytics tool for the computing metadata of the ATLAS experiment at LHC, includes research of various approaches for data ...handling both on server and client sides. InVEx is implemented as a web-based application which aims at the enhancing of analytical and visualization capabilities of the existing monitoring tools and facilitates the process of data analysis with the interactivity and human supervision. The current work is focused on the architecture enhancements of the InVEx application. First, we will describe the user-manageable data preparation stage for cluster analysis. Then, the Level-of-Detail approach for the interactive visual analysis will be presented. It starts with the low detailing, when all data records are grouped (by clustering algorithms or by categories) and aggregated. We provide users with means to look deeply into this data, incrementally increasing the level of detail. Finally, we demonstrate the development of data storage backend for InVEx, which is adapted for the Level-of-Detail method to keep all stages of data derivation sequence.
Having information such as an estimation of the processing time or possibility of system outage (abnormal behaviour) helps to assist to monitor system performance and to predict its next state. The ...current cyber-infrastructure of the ATLAS Production System presents computing conditions in which contention for resources among high-priority data analyses happens routinely, that might lead to significant workload and data handling interruptions. The lack of the possibility to monitor and to predict the behaviour of the analysis process (its duration) and system's state itself provides motivation for a focus on design of the built-in situational awareness analytic tools.