Performance, reliability and scalability in data-access are key issues in the context of the computing Grid and High Energy Physics data processing and analysis applications, in particular ...considering the large data size and I/O load that a Large Hadron Collider data centre has to support. In this paper we present the technical details and the results of a large scale validation and performance measurement employing different data-access platforms-namely CASTOR, dCache, GPFS and Scalla/Xrootd. The tests have been performed at the CNAF Tier-1, the central computing facility of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research (INFN). Our storage back-end was based on Fibre Channel disk-servers organized in a Storage Area Network, being the disk-servers connected to the computing farm via Gigabit LAN. We used 24 disk-servers, 260 TB of raw-disk space and 280 worker nodes as computing clients, able to run concurrently up to about 1100 jobs. The aim of the test was to perform sequential and random read/write accesses to the data, as well as more realistic access patterns, in order to evaluate efficiency, availability, robustness and performance of the various data-access solutions.
Abstract
The Extreme Energy Events experiment (EEE) is a cosmic ray observatory made of about 60 muon telescopes based on Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) detectors. The EEE experiment has two ...main targets: a scientific and a dissemination. The EEE collaboration has also developed a large set of portable scintillator-based detectors, named Cosmic Box (CB), mainly used for educational purposes. The CB allows students to perform cosmic ray counting measurements in several environments. CBs are made of two 15 × 15 × 1 cm scintillators read by two 3 × 3 mm
2
SiPMs operated in coincidence. Three CBs were deployed in Nuraxi Figus and Seruci coal mine to perform an underground measurement of the cosmic muon flux attenuation. High school and university students were directly involved in all the stages of the measurements: from the preliminary measurements to the on-site work and data analysis.
The new Trigger/GPS module for the extreme energy events project Abbrescia, M.; Avanzini, C.; Baek, Y. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
10/2019, Letnik:
942
Journal Article
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The Extreme Energy Event (EEE) project is an experiment devoted to the study of high energy Extensive Air Showers (EAS) over a very large area, using an array of muon telescopes. At present the array ...is composed of more than 50 stations, most of them distributed across the Italian territory, on a total area of around 3×105km2. The telescopes are based on position-sensitive Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) whose readout strips are connected to two TDC (Time-to-Digital Converter) units. Here a novel VME trigger unit for the EEE telescopes is presented, which also includes an embedded GPS receiver for precision timing applications. This new unit gets together, in the same electronic board, the functionalities of different parts of the electronics used up to now in the EEE experiment, and adds new ones, making the whole readout system simpler, more flexible and robust. Details about the trigger/GPS unit, including some measurements of its time resolution, are reported here.
The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) project is an extended array for cosmic rays survey. It was conceived by Antonino Zichichi and supported by the Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche ...“Enrico Fermi” with the collaboration of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). This experiment is aimed to study cosmic rays of extreme high energy, and related phenomena. To achieve this goal, a network of nearly 50 muon telescopes has been installed in high schools, distributed throughout the Italian territory, either as single stations or clusters. During the second coordinated run of data taking, which ended in May 2016, 25 billion muon tracks were detected and reconstructed. This huge amount of data, allows us to undertake various studies: the dependence of the local muon flux on solar activity; the sky anisotropy on sub-TeV scale; event correlations, due to EAS, between clustered telescopes at distances from a few hundred meters to over a kilometre. The status of the project and some results will be presented.
The Extreme Energy Events project (EEE) is aimed to study Extensive Air Showers (EAS) from primary cosmic rays of more than 1018 eV energy detecting the ground secondary muon component using an array ...of telescopes with high spatial and time resolution. The second goal of the EEE project is to involve High School teachers and students in this advanced research work and to initiate them in scientific culture: to reach both purposes the telescopes are located inside High School buildings and the detector construction, assembling and monitoring - together with data taking and analysis - are done by researchers from scientific institutions in close collaboration with them. At present there are 42 telescopes in just as many High Schools scattered all over Italy, islands included, plus two at CERN and three in INFN units. We report here some preliminary physics results from the first two common data taking periods together with the outreach impact of the project.
The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project is a Centro Fermi - CERN - INFN - MIUR Collaboration Project, for the study of extremely high-energy cosmic rays, which exploits the Multigap Resistive Plate ...Chamber (MRPC) technology. The excellent time resolution and good tracking capability of this detector allows us to study Extensive Air Showers (EAS) with an array of telescopes distributed all over the Italian territory. Each telescope is installed in a High School, with the additional goal to introduce students to particle and astroparticle Physics. The EEE array is composed, so far, of 47 telescopes, each made of three MRPC planes, spanning more than 10 degrees in latitude and 11 in longitude, organized in clusters and single telescope stations. The status of the experiment and the results, obtained during two recent coordinated data taking periods, will be reported. The observation of Forbush decreases, coincidence events among different telescopes and the muon decay, using more than 5 billion tracks collected in the last few months, are of particular interest.
Results from the PolarquEEEst missions Abbrescia, M.; Avanzini, C.; Balbi, G. ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
06/2020, Letnik:
1561, Številka:
1
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The PolarquEEEst scientific programme consists in a series of measurements of the cosmic ray flux up to the highest latitudes. It started in Summer 2018, when three telescopes made out of ...scintillators readout by SiPMs were built and installed in Italy, Norway and on a sailboat leaving from North Island, to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago and land in Tromsø. They collected data on a latitude range from 44° N up to 82° N, with a dense sampling of the Northernmost interval. The PolarquEEEst mission continued afterwards with a series of measurements in Italy, Southward reaching Lampedusa, and in Germany. In May 2019 the PolarquEEEst collaboration accomplished another important result, installing a cosmic ray observatory for the detection of secondary cosmic muons at Ny Alesund, at 79° N, made of three independent identical detectors positioned a few hundred meters from each other, and synchronized in order to operate together as a network. The configuration used will allow high precision measurements never performed before at these latitudes on a long term, also interesting for their connection with environmental phenomena. The network will also complement the existing stations for the detection of cosmic neutrons at the Svalbard archipelago, enlarging by far the physics scope that is possible to pursue in this field at this peculiar location. Here the various missions are presented, and some preliminary results from the measurements performed are shown.
Cosmic ray muons are a penetrating component of extensive air showers created in the Earth atmosphere by the interaction of highly energetic primary particles, mostly protons, which continuously ...bombard our Planet. The secondary cosmic radiation is the result of the complex interplay between the production cross section and the interaction mechanisms with the atmosphere (including the energy loss, multiple scattering and particle decay). Cosmic muons have been considered since several decades as a powerful probe to exploit our environment, from muography of volcanoes to absorption radiography of possible hidden rooms inside large structures, such as Pyramids, to the detection of high-Z illicit nuclear materials inside containers and many other applications of social interest. This paper discusses the possibility to employ the Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project as muon tracking detectors to monitor the long term stability of civil buildings and structures when used in conjunction with additional detectors. For this application the average direction of the cosmic muon tracks passing through the MRPC telescope and an additional detector located some distance apart in the same building may be reconstructed with good precision and any small variation over long time acquisition periods may be monitored. The performance of such setup is discussed and experimental results from first coincidence measurements obtained with a 40 × 60 cm2 scintillator detector operated in the same building with one of the EEE telescopes, at about 15 m vertical distance from it, are presented. Simple Monte Carlo and GEANT simulations were also carried out to evaluate typical acceptance values for the operating conditions employed so far, to extrapolate to other geometrical configurations, and to evaluate multiple scattering effects.
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