Data Management for Physics Analysis in Phenix (BNL, RHIC)

TL;DR

This paper discusses data management challenges and solutions for physics analysis in the PHENIX experiment, focusing on distributed data handling, job submission, and system integration using Grid technologies.

Contribution

It presents practical experiences and system prototypes for managing large-scale physics data using Grid software within the PHENIX collaboration environment.

Findings

Successful implementation of file and replica catalog systems

Effective data transfer over WAN for physics analysis

Enhanced job submission across multiple clusters

Abstract

Every year the PHENIX collaboration deals with increasing volume of data (now about 1/4 PB/year). Apparently the more data the more questions how to process all the data in most efficient way. In recent past many developments in HEP computing were dedicated to the production environment. Now we need more tools to help to obtain physics results from the analysis of distributed simulated and experimental data. Developments in Grid architectures gave many examples how distributed computing facilities can be organized to meet physics analysis needs. We feel that our main task in this area is to try to use already developed systems or system components in PHENIX environment. We are concentrating here on the followed problems: file/replica catalog which keep names of our files, data moving over WAN, job submission in multicluster environment. PHENIX is a running experiment and this fact narrowed our ability to test new software on the collaboration computer facilities. We are experimenting with system prototypes at State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNYSB) where we run midrange computing cluster for physics analysis. The talk is dedicated to discuss some experience with Grid software and achieved results.