JINR used DIRAC platform to triple speed of scientific tasks implementation Since 2016, JINR has created and is developing a service for unified access to heterogeneous distributed computing resources based on the DIRAC Interware open platform, which includes all the main computing resources of JINR. The created platform has already made it possible to accelerate the processing of large sets of jobs by about three times. The speed of computing is provided, among other things, by the integration of the clouds of scientific organizations of the JINR Member States, the cluster of the National Autonomous University in Mexico, and the resources of the National Research Computer Network of Russia, NIKS, which provides access to the network infrastructure to more than 200 organizations of higher education and science. At the moment, the DIRAC-based service is used to solve the tasks of collaborations of all three experiments at the Accelerator Complex of the NICA Megascience Project: MPD, BM@N and SPD, as well as the Baikal-GVD Neutrino Telescope. “In fact, integration made it possible to combine all the large computing resources of JINR with each other. If there was no integration, users would most likely have to choose one of the resources and configure all workflows for its operation. Using a coherent infrastructure allows one not to be attached to a specific resource, but to use all the resources that are available. For large sets of jobs, this speeds up the execution by about three times,” a researcher of the Distributed Systems Sector at MLIT Igor Pelevanyuk said. He noted that without the DIRAC Interware-based service, the relevant tasks of mass generation of the MPD Experiment data would be considered longer and would completely occupy a separate computing resource for several months. As of January 2023, thanks to the integration of resources using DIRAC, 1.9 million jobs were completed on the capacities of the distributed platform. The number of calculations performed is estimated at 13 million HEPSPEC2006 days, which is the equivalent of 1,900 years of calculations on one core of the modern central processor. Thus, the average duration of the execution of one task in the system was almost 9 hours. More...
