Science-Driven Network Requirements for ESnet

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is the primary providerof network connectivity for the US Department of Energy Office ofScience, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physicalsciences in the United States. In support of the Office of Scienceprograms, ESnet regularly updates and refreshes its understanding of thenetworking requirements of the instruments, facilities and scientiststhat it serves. This focus has helped ESnet to be a highly successfulenabler of scientific discovery for over 20 years. In August, 2002 theDOE Office of Science organized a workshop to characterize the networkingrequirements for Office of Science programs. Networking and middlewarerequirements were solicited from a representative group of scienceprograms. The workshop was summarized in two documents the workshop finalreport and a set of appendixes. This document updates the networkingrequirements for ESnet as put forward by the science programs listed inthe 2002 workshop report. In addition, three new programs have beenadded. Theinformation was gathered through interviews with knowledgeablescientists in each particular program or field

Grid Collector: Facilitating Efficient Selective Access from Data Grids

The Grid Collector is a system that facilitates the effective analysis and spontaneous exploration of scientific data. It combines an efficient indexing technology with a Grid file management technology to speed up common analysis jobs on high-energy physics data and to enable some previously impractical analysis jobs. To analyze a set of high-energy collision events, one typically specifies the files containing the events of interest, reads all the events in the files, and filters out unwanted ones. Since most analysis jobs filter out significant number of events, a considerable amount of time is wasted by reading the unwanted events. The Grid Collector removes this inefficiency by allowing users to specify more precisely what events are of interest and to read only the selected events. This speeds up most analysis jobs. In existing analysis frameworks, the responsibility of bringing files from tertiary storages or remote sites to local disks falls on the users. This forces most of analysis jobs to be performed at centralized computer facilities where commonly used files are kept on large shared file systems. The Grid Collector automates file management tasks and eliminates the labor-intensive manual file transfers. This makes it much easier to perform analyses that require data files on tertiary storages and remote sites. It also makes more computer resources available for analysis jobs since they are no longer bound to the centralized facilities

Grid Collector: Facilitating Efficient Selective Access from Data Grids

The Grid Collector is a system that facilitates the effective analysis and spontaneous exploration of scientific data. It combines an efficient indexing technology with a Grid file management technology to speed up common analysis jobs on high-energy physics data and to enable some previously impractical analysis jobs. To analyze a set of high-energy collision events, one typically specifies the files containing the events of interest, reads all the events in the files, and filters out unwanted ones. Since most analysis jobs filter out significant number of events, a considerable amount of time is wasted by reading the unwanted events. The Grid Collector removes this inefficiency by allowing users to specify more precisely what events are of interest and to read only the selected events. This speeds up most analysis jobs. In existing analysis frameworks, the responsibility of bringing files from tertiary storages or remote sites to local disks falls on the users. This forces most of analysis jobs to be performed at centralized computer facilities where commonly used files are kept on large shared file systems. The Grid Collector automates file management tasks and eliminates the labor-intensive manual file transfers. This makes it much easier to perform analyses that require data files on tertiary storages and remote sites. It also makes more computer resources available for analysis jobs since they are no longer bound to the centralized facilities

LBNL-57677 Grid Collector: Facilitating Efficient Selective Access from Data Grids

Abstract — The Grid Collector is a system that facilitates the effective analysis and spontaneous exploration of scientific data. It combines an efficient indexing technology with a Grid file management technology to speed up common analysis jobs on high-energy physics data and to enable some previously impractical analysis jobs. To analyze a set of high-energy collision events, one typically specifies the files containing the events of interest, reads all the events in the files, and filters out unwanted ones. Since most analysis jobs filter out significant number of events, a considerable amount of time is wasted by reading the unwanted events. The Grid Collector removes this inefficiency by allowing users to specify more precisely what events are of interest and to read only the selected events. This speeds up most analysis jobs. In existing analysis frameworks, the responsibility of bringing files from tertiary storages or remote sites to local disks falls on the users. This forces most of analysis jobs to be performed at centralized computer facilities where commonly used files are kept on large shared file systems. The Grid Collector automates file management tasks and eliminates the labor-intensive manual file transfers. This makes it much easier to perform analyses that require data files on tertiary storages and remote sites. It also makes more computer resources available for analysis jobs since they are no longer bound to the centralized facilities

LBNL-2164E FastBit: Interactively Searching Massive Data

As scientific instruments and computer simulations produce more and more data, the task of locating the essential information to gain insight becomes increasingly difficult. FastBit is an efficient software tool to address this challenge. In this article, we present a summary of the key underlying technologies, namely bitmap compression, encoding, and binning. Together these techniques enable FastBit to answer structured (SQL) queries orders of magnitude faster than popular database systems. To illustrate how FastBit is used in applications, we present three examples involving a high-energy physics experiment, a combustion simulation, and an accelerator simulation. In each case, FastBit significantly reduces the response time and enables interactive exploration on terabytes of data.