SLAC: BaBar

From Devwiki

Jump to: navigation, search

"The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SLAC research program centers on experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics using electron beams and a broad program of research in atomic and solid state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using synchrotron radiation.[1] The 3.2 kilometer (2.0 mile) long underground accelerator is the longest linear accelerator in the world, and is claimed to be "the world's straightest object."[2] SLAC's meeting facilities provided a venue for the homebrew computer club and other pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and later SLAC hosted the first webpage in the U.S. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline is the longest building in the United States." - Wikipedia


Contents

[hide]

[edit] Objectivity Case History

This page needs expansion. Please update it and remove this banner when all fields are complete.

[edit] Important

This information is an archive, so any use of the present sense in the text should be taken in the historical context, generally determinable from the Status section below.

[edit] Customer Information

[edit] Status

  • First Contact: 1998
  • Lead came from: CERN: RD45
  • Evaluation Start Date: 2000
  • Evaluation Finish Date: 2000
  • First Purchase Date: 2000
  • Deployment Date: 2001
  • Current Status: Deployed, but in a subset of the original project. See below.
  • Can we talk about this customer and the product/project? Yes, via the Objectivity representative.
  • Referenceable?: Yes, with care.

[edit] Environment

  • Hardware: Sun E1000 servers and Dell Intel.
  • Operating System: Solaris and Windows.
  • Precision: 32-bit and 64-bit.
  • Development language: C++ (3 million lines of code)
  • Compiler: OS manufacturer's.
  • Third Party vendor tools:
  • Open Source tools:


[edit] The Project/Product

[edit] Project Background

SLAC was a collaborator in the CERN: RD45 evaluation of database technologies for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project. They selected Objectivity/DB for BaBar as a result of the extensive evaluation across multiple disciplines, believing that it offered the only commercially available product that could meet their throughput, performance and scalability requirements.

[edit] Project/Product Description

The BaBar experiment -- a collaboration of 600 physicists from nine nations -- observes collisions between subatomic particles to understand how the behavior of matter and antimatter shaped our universe.

By 2004, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) had stored over one Petabyte (compressed to 984 TB) of production data using Objectivity/DB. The production data is distributed across 120 on-line data (AMS) servers, using 2400 CPUs. SLAC uses Objectivity/DB for its flagship research project named B Factory, which includes the PEP II accelerator and the BaBar particle detector.

In 2005 the BaBar user community decided to revert to generating structured files in a format named ROOT. This was not because of dissatisfaction with Objectivity/DB, which had performed beyond expectations, but a reaction to the need to rapidly build and deploy their software on an ever widening range of platforms, operating systems and compilers. There was also pressure from a high level Director at the DoE to move away from commercial softwar to open source. Objectivity offered a "Rapid Build factory" approach, but the decision was made, much to the annoyance of the Director of Computing for BaBar, who remained a strong proponent of Objectivity/DB. By late 2006 new data was being collected in structured files and much of the functionality provided by Objectivity/DB, plus the ability to use PQE, was lost. However, Objectivity/DB is still used in the multi-Terabyte equipment and experiment configuration management system.

[edit] Buying Criteria

[edit] Business Priorities

  • Flexible licensing for the BaBar international community of developers and the 2400 processor compute farm.

[edit] Technical Priorities

  • Scalability
  • Throughput
  • Performance with highly complex data.
  • Objectivity/DB and SLAC jointly developed the Objectivity Open File System (OOFS), a layer between the AMS and the file system that makes access to mass storage devices transparent to the client. SLAC uses HPSS and Storagetek tape silos for near-line storage.
  • SLAC also implemented a Generalized Storage Architecture security hook inside OOFS. It works at the file level and is user replaceable.

[edit] Competitors/Alternatives

[edit] Why They Chose Objectivity

  • They selected Objectivity/DB for BaBar as a result of the extensive evaluation across multiple disciplines, believing that it offered the only commercially available product that could meet their throughput, performance and scalability requirements.
  • The ability to to joint engineering projects to ensure that BaBar could ingest and process the data in a timely manner.

[edit] Partners

  • None

[edit] Collateral

  1. Press Releases:
  2. Flyers:
  3. White Papers:
  4. Case Study:
  5. Other: SLAC presentation at WorldView 2005

[edit] Contact Information

  • Objectivity Rep:
  • Customer Contact:
  • Customer Phone:
  • Customer Email:
  • URL:

[edit] External Links

[edit] Related Pages

[edit] Categories

Retrieved from "http://devwiki.objy.com/objywiki/index.php/SLAC:_BaBar"