110405827
Storage management solutions and performance tests at the INFN Tier-1
Performance, reliability and scalability in data access are key issues in the context of HEP data processing and analysis applications. In this paper we present the results of a large scale performance measurement performed at the INFN-CNAF Tier-1, employing some storage solutions presently available for HEP computing, namely CASTOR, GPFS, Scalla/Xrootd and dCache. The storage infrastructure was based on Fibre Channel systems organized in a Storage Area Network, providing 260 TB of total disk space, and 24 disk servers connected to the computing farm (280 worker nodes) via Gigabit LAN. We also describe the deployment of a StoRM SRM instance at CNAF, configured to manage a GPFS file system, presenting and discussing its performances.
9108097
Performance Studies of the StoRM Storage Resource Manager
High performance disk-storage solutions based on parallel file systems are becoming increasingly important to fulfill the large I/O throughput required by high-energy physics applications. Storage area networks (SAN) are commonly employed at the Large Hadron Collider data centres, and SAN-oriented parallel file systems such as GPFS and Lustre provide high scalability and availability by aggregating many data volumes served by multiple disk-servers into a single POSIX file system hierarchy. Since these file systems do not come with a storage resource manager (SRM) interface, necessary to access and manage the data volumes in a grid environment, a specific project called StoRM has been developed for providing them with the necessary SRM capabilities. In this paper we describe the deployment of a StoRM instance, configured to manage a GPFS file system. A software suite has been realized in order to perform stress tests of functionality and throughput on StoRM. We present the results of these tests.
118962606
Computing models and distributed data analysis at LHC
62765062
LHCb experience with LFC replication
Database replication is a key topic in the framework of the LHC Computing Grid to allow processing of data in a distributed environment. In particular, the LHCb computing model relies on the LHC File Catalog, i.e. a database which stores information about files spread across the GRID, their logical names and the physical locations of all the replicas. The LHCb computing model requires the LFC to be replicated at Tier-1s. The LCG 3D project deals with the database replication issue and provides a replication service based on Oracle Streams technology. This paper describes the deployment of the LHC File Catalog replication to the INFN National Center for Telematics and Informatics (CNAF) and to other LHCb Tier-1 sites. We performed stress tests designed to evaluate any delay in the propagation of the streams and the scalability of the system. The tests show the robustness of the replica implementation with performance going much beyond the LHCb requirements.
27136629
A Comparison of Data-Access Platforms for the Computing of Large Hadron Collider Experiments
Performance, reliability and scalability in data-access are key issues in the context of the computing Grid and High Energy Physics data processing and analysis applications, in particular considering the large data size and I/O load that a Large Hadron Collider data centre has to support. In this paper we present the technical details and the results of a large scale validation and performance measurement employing different data-access platforms-namely CASTOR, dCache, GPFS and Scalla/Xrootd. The tests have been performed at the CNAF Tier-1, the central computing facility of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research (INFN). Our storage back-end was based on Fibre Channel disk-servers organized in a Storage Area Network, being the disk-servers connected to the computing farm via Gigabit LAN. We used 24 disk-servers, 260 TB of raw-disk space and 280 worker nodes as computing clients, able to run concurrently up to about 1100 jobs. The aim of the test was to perform sequential and random read/write accesses to the data, as well as more realistic access patterns, in order to evaluate efficiency, availability, robustness and performance of the various data-access solutions.
117179864
LHCb distributed data analysis
17099587
Self-consistent Green's functions formalism with three-body interactions
We extend the self-consistent Green's functions formalism to take into account three-body interactions. We analyze the perturbative expansion in terms of Feynman diagrams and define effective one- and two-body interactions, which allows for a substantial reduction of the number of diagrams. The procedure can be taken as a generalization of the normal ordering of the Hamiltonian to fully correlated density matrices. We give examples up to third order in perturbation theory. To define nonperturbative approximations, we extend the equation of motion method in the presence of three-body interactions. We propose schemes that can provide nonperturbative resummation of three-body interactions. We also discuss two different extensions of the Koltun sum rule to compute the ground state of a many-body system.
118709020
Symmetric nuclear matter with chiral three-nucleon forces in the self-consistent Green's functions approach
We present calculations for symmetric nuclear matter using chiral nuclear interactions within the self-consistent Green's functions approach in the ladder approximation. Three-body forces are included via effective one-body and two-body interactions, computed from an uncorrelated average over a third particle. We discuss the effect of the three-body forces on the total energy, computed with an extended Galitskii-Migdal-Koltun sum-rule, as well as on single-particle properties. Saturation properties are substantially improved when three-body forces are included, but there is still some underlying dependence on the similarity renormalization group evolution scale.
121949862
Constraints for solar neutrinos fluxes
Abstract Constraints on the neutrino fluxes Φ p , Φ B , Φ CNO and Φ Be are derived from the available experimental results. Physical implications are discussed by means of non-extensive statistics which takes into account many-body effects and long-range interactions. The different reduction factors for 7 Be and 8 B fluxes with respect to their standard solar model values are physically understood, with proper shapes of the shape of the electron and proton distribution functions.
118416634
Self-consistent Green's functions with three-body forces
The quantum many-body problem is an everlasting challenge for theoretical physics. The aim sought is to analyze, at the quantum level, the observables arising from a group formed by a certain number of interacting particles N. In the specific case of nuclear physics, the study and interpretation of interacting nuclear systems has spanned from the finite nuclei to the infinite nuclear matter case. In order to characterize such systems, the forces with which nucleons interact in their interior need to be sorted out. Once the Hamiltonian is chosen, the many-body problem for the group of interacting fermions, the nucleons, has to be solved. In the present thesis we focus our study on infinite nuclear matter, analyzing the properties of the two systems which stand at the extremes in terms of isospin asymmetry: symmetric nuclear matter (SNM), with an equal number on neutrons and protons, and pure neutron matter (PNM), with only neutrons. We base our approach in terms of realistic microscopic potentials, hence we need to choose a many-body technique in order to treat the potential. We choose to perform our calculations exploiting the formalism provided by the self-consistent Green's function's (SCGF) theory. This approach is based on a diagrammatic expansion of the single-particle (SP) Green's function, or propagator. This method was devised to treat the correlated, i.e. beyond mean-field, behavior of strongly interacting systems, such as nuclear matter. Unfortunately, it is a well established fact that whatever microscopic two-nucleon forces (2NFs) are used in the many-body calculation, empirical saturation properties of nuclear matter fail to be reproduced. Saturation densities appear at high values, presenting energies which are inconsistently too attractive, overbinding nuclear matter. This inconsistency bears some similarities to the case of light nuclei where, on the contrary, the 2NF-only based theory underbinds experimental data. The inclusion of three-nucleon forces (3NFs) has been the indispensable factor to cure this deficiency. Hence, microscopic 3NFs have been mostly devised to provide attraction in light finite systems, small densities, and repulsion in infinite systems, high densities. However, in modeling these 3NFs, the inclusion of phenomenological ingredients has often been the way followed. To bypass the need to adjust the potential with ad hoc contributions, an alternative has been provided by chiral effective field theory (EFT). Featuring the consistent Hamiltonian at the 2N and 3N level provided by EFT, in this thesis we present calculations including both chiral 2NFs and 3NFs. This is dealt within an extended SCGF formalism, specifically formulated to include consistently 3B forces by means of effective interactions. We observe the striking effect of the inclusion of 3N forces for the total energy of the many-body ground state. Exploiting the extended SCGF approach presented in this thesis, we see how the modifications induced by the 3B force are larger as the density increases. This increasing with density is what provides the saturation mechanism for nuclear matter. In pure neutron matter, 3NFs are the main cause for the stiffening of the equation of state. In view of astrophysical studies for neutron star masses, this stiffening is a major ingredient for the achievement of theoretical results which can better match recent astrophysical observations. The idea, on which the development of this thesis was based, has been all the way the quest to introduce consistently three-body forces in the formalism of the SCGF theory. While the main motivation of this study has been nuclear systems, the extended SCGF formalism can be easily applied to other many-body systems, of either atomic or molecular nature.
11870428
High-momentum components in the nuclear symmetry energy
The short-range and tensor correlations associated to realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions induce a population of high-momentum components in the many-body nuclear wave function. We study the impact of such high-momentum components on bulk observables associated to isospin asymmetric matter. The kinetic part of the symmetry energy is strongly reduced by correlations when compared to the non-interacting case. The origin of this behaviour is elucidated using realistic interactions with different short-range and tensor structures.