Massively parallel computing for particle physics

Thesis

This thesis presents methods to run scientific code safely on a global-scale desktop grid. Current attempts to harness the world’s idle desktop computers face obstacles such as donor security, portability of code and privilege requirements. Nereus, a Java-based architecture, is a novel framework that overcomes these obstacles and allows the creation of a globally-scalable desktop grid capable of executing Java bytecode. However, most scientific code is written for the x86 architecture. To enable the safe execution of unmodified scientific code, we created JPC, a pure Java x86 PC emulator.

The Nereus framework is applied to two tasks, a trivially parallel data generation task, BlackMax, and a parallelization and fault tolerance framework, Mycelia. Mycelia is an implementation of the Map-Reduce parallel programming paradigm. BlackMax is a microscopic blackhole event generator, of direct relevance for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Nereus based BlackMax adaptation dramatically speeds up the production of data, limited only by the number of desktop machines available.

Authors: Preston, I

• Publication date: 2010
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ke2orrk2m
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: map-reduce; emulation; virtualization; parallel computing; grid computing
• Subjects: Particle physics