A Modular and Fault-Tolerant Data Transport Framework

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular, flexible, and fault-tolerant data transport framework designed for high-throughput, large-scale cluster systems in particle physics experiments, with promising performance results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, component-based data transport framework with runtime configurability and fault tolerance for large-scale scientific data acquisition systems.

Findings

Framework achieves high data throughput meeting ALICE requirements

Component-based design allows flexible configuration and extension

Fault-tolerance mechanisms enable reliable operation in large clusters

Abstract

The High Level Trigger (HLT) of the future ALICE heavy-ion experiment has to reduce its input data rate of up to 25 GB/s to at most 1.25 GB/s for output before the data is written to permanent storage. To cope with these data rates a large PC cluster system is being designed to scale to several 1000 nodes, connected by a fast network. For the software that will run on these nodes a flexible data transport and distribution software framework, described in this thesis, has been developed. The framework consists of a set of separate components, that can be connected via a common interface. This allows to construct different configurations for the HLT, that are even changeable at runtime. To ensure a fault-tolerant operation of the HLT, the framework includes a basic fail-over mechanism that allows to replace whole nodes after a failure. The mechanism will be further expanded in the future, utilizing the runtime reconnection feature of the framework's component interface. To connect cluster nodes a communication class library is used that abstracts from the actual network technology and protocol used to retain flexibility in the hardware choice. It contains already two working prototype versions for the TCP protocol as well as SCI network adapters. Extensions can be added to the library without modifications to other parts of the framework. Extensive tests and measurements have been performed with the framework. Their results as well as conclusions drawn from them are also presented in this thesis. Performance tests show very promising results for the system, indicating that it can fulfill ALICE's requirements concerning the data transport.