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Foulkes, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Foulkes, S..

A New Era for Central Processing and Production in CMS

The goal for CMS computing is to maximise the throughput of simulated event generation while also processing event data generated by the detector as quickly and reliably as possible. To maintain this achievement as the quantity of events increases CMS computing has migrated at the Tier 1 level from its old production framework, ProdAgent, to a new one, WMAgent. The WMAgent framework offers improved processing efficiency and increased resource usage as well as a reduction in operational manpower. In addition to the challenges encountered during the design of the WMAgent framework, several operational issues have arisen during its commissioning. The largest operational challenges were in the usage and monitoring of resources, mainly a result of a change in the way work is allocated. Instead of work being assigned to operators, all work is centrally injected and managed in the Request Manager system and the task of the operators has changed from running individual workflows to monitoring the global workload. In this report we present how we tackled some of the operational challenges, and how we benefitted from the lessons learned in the commissioning of the WMAgent framework at the Tier 2 level in late 2011. As case studies, we will show how the WMAgent system performed during some of the large data reprocessing and Monte Carlo simulation campaigns.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Multi-core processing and scheduling performance in CMS

Commodity hardware is going many-core. We might soon not be able to satisfy the job memory needs per core in the current single-core processing model in High Energy Physics. In addition, an ever increasing number of independent and incoherent jobs running on the same physical hardware not sharing resources might significantly affect processing performance. It will be essential to effectively utilize the multi-core architecture. CMS has incorporated support for multi-core processing in the event processing framework and the workload management system. Multi-core processing jobs share common data in memory, such us the code libraries, detector geometry and conditions data, resulting in a much lower memory usage than standard single-core independent jobs. Exploiting this new processing model requires a new model in computing resource allocation, departing from the standard single-core allocation for a job. The experiment job management system needs to have control over a larger quantum of resource since multi-core aware jobs require the scheduling of multiples cores simultaneously. CMS is exploring the approach of using whole nodes as unit in the workload management system where all cores of a node are allocated to a multi-core job. Whole-node scheduling allows for optimization of the data/workflow management (e.g. I/O caching, local merging) but efficient utilization of all scheduled cores is challenging. Dedicated whole-node queues have been setup at all Tier-1 centers for exploring multi-core processing workflows in CMS. We present the evaluation of the performance scheduling and executing multi-core workflows in whole-node queues compared to the standard single-core processing workflows.

Hernandez, J. M.↗

The CMS workload management system

CMS has started the process of rolling out a new workload management system. This system is currently used for reprocessing and Monte Carlo production with tests under way using it for user analysis. It was decided to combine, as much as possible, the production/processing, analysis and T0 codebases so as to reduce duplicated functionality and make best use of limited developer and testing resources. This system now includes central request submission and management (Request Manager), a task queue for parcelling up and distributing work (WorkQueue) and agents which process requests by interfacing with disparate batch and storage resources (WMAgent).

Cinquilli, M.↗