62560089
DIRAC: reliable data management for LHCb
DIRAC, LHCb's Grid Workload and Data Management System, utilizes WLCG resources and middleware components to perform distributed computing tasks satisfying LHCb's Computing Model. The Data Management System (DMS) handles data transfer and data access within LHCb. Its scope ranges from the output of the LHCb Online system to Grid-enabled storage for all data types. It supports metadata for these files in replica and bookkeeping catalogues, allowing dataset selection and localization. The DMS controls the movement of files in a redundant fashion whilst providing utilities for accessing all metadata. To do these tasks effectively the DMS requires complete self integrity between its components and external physical storage. The DMS provides highly redundant management of all LHCb data to leverage available storage resources and to manage transient errors in underlying services. It provides data driven and reliable distribution of files as well as reliable job output upload, utilizing VO Boxes at LHCb Tier1 sites to prevent data loss. This paper presents several examples of mechanisms implemented in the DMS to increase reliability, availability and integrity, highlighting successful design choices and limitations discovered.
129617632
The Durham Extensive Air Shower Array
5719579
DIRAC: A Community Grid Solution
The DIRAC system was developed in order to provide a complete solution for using the distributed computing resources of the LHCb experiment at CERN for data production and analysis. It allows a concurrent use of over 10K CPUs and 10M file replicas distributed over many tens of sites. The sites can be part of a Computing Grid such as WLCG or standalone computing clusters all integrated in a single management structure. DIRAC is a generic system with the LHCb specific functionality incorporated through a number of plug-in modules. It can be easily adapted to the needs of other communities. Special attention is paid to the resilience of the DIRAC components to allow an efficient use of non-reliable resources. The DIRAC production management components provide a framework for building highly automated data production systems including data distribution and data driven workload scheduling. In this paper we give an overview of the DIRAC system architecture and design choices. We show how different components are put together to compose an integrated data processing system including all the aspects of the LHCb experiment - from the MC production and raw data reconstruction to the final user analysis.
120919376
The Durham air shower array - III: Evaluation of the array's response to showers
Abstract A Monte Carlo investigation of the Durham air shower array is described in which the systematic biases introduced into air shower data recorded by the experiment are evaluated.
62238242
Data stream handling in the LHCb experiment
This paper presents the event data handling in the LHCb experiment, starting from the acceptance of events by the software trigger farm to making the data available for offline reprocessing. In the data acquisition system, events accepted by the High Level Trigger farm are assembled into streams according to their type. Each stream will be written to disk as a 2 GB file for optimal storage and ease of reconstruction. Under nominal conditions about 2 such files will be produced per minute. The life cycle and state transitions of each file are managed by means of a dedicated database. These files must be copied to the tape storage and simultaneously be made available online to various calibration and monitoring tasks. Additionally, to initiate the start of the offline re-processing all file parameters must be propagated to the offline Grid data analysis system. This system has been designed for extreme robustness and reliability with redundancy in almost every component and supports various fail-over mechanisms. The software, hardware, and protocols designed for this purpose will be discussed in detail. Performance figures of data-challenges done in 2007 will be shown.
31995433
Data Handling and Transfer in the LHCb Experiment
This paper focuses on the management of raw event data files containing the electronic response to particle collisions in the LHCb detector at the LHC storage ring at CERN. The typical file life cycle is presented, starting from writing of raw event streams into files to transfer to the CERN tape storage system and to the offline GRID distributed processing infrastructure. A distributed solution centered on a dedicated database is implemented to address the raw event data management needs. The solution is integrated with the data acquisition system software chain and with the experiment control system. The software architecture and hardware configurations are explained together with the testing methods, current development status and future plans.
115544175
Estimated rates for electron backgrounds at LEP
3675875
Galaxy Zoo: Quantifying Morphological Indicators of Galaxy Interaction
We use Galaxy Zoo 2 visual classifications to study the morphological signatures of interaction between similar-mass galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find that many observable features correlate with projected pair separation – not only obvious indicators of merging, disturbance and tidal tails, but also more regular features, such as spiral arms and bars. These trends are robustly quantified, using a control sample to account for observational biases, producing measurements of the strength and separation scale of various morphological responses to pair interaction. For example, we find that the presence of spiral features is enhanced at scales ≲ 70 h− 170 kpc, probably due to both increased star formation and the formation of tidal tails. On the other hand, the likelihood of identifying a bar decreases significantly in pairs with separations ≲ 30 h− 170 kpc, suggesting that bars are suppressed by close interactions between galaxies of similar mass. We go on to show how morphological indicators of physical interactions provide a way of significantly refining standard estimates for the frequency of close pair interactions, based on velocity offset and projected separation. The presence of loosely wound spiral arms is found to be a particularly reliable signal of an interaction, for projected pair separations up to ∼100 h− 170 kpc. We use this indicator to demonstrate our method, constraining the fraction of low-redshift galaxies in truly interacting pairs, with M* > 109.5 M⊙ and mass ratio <4, to be between 0.4 and 2.7 per cent.
121223746
Correlations between large transverse momentum π0 mesons and charged particles at the CERN ISR
Abstract A study of the charged particles emitted together with a large transverse momentum π O was made at the CERN ISR at a centre-of-mass energy s = 52.7 GeV . The π O mesons and the charged particles were observed in two detectors, each centred at θ cm = 90° and each covering a laboratory solid angle of 0.59 sr for π o 's and 1.1 sr for charged particles. The multiplicity of charged particles, observed in the same and in the opposite hemisphere as the π O , was found to be larger than the average multiplicity for inelastic interactions. Some rapidity and azimuthal correlations were observed.
18104149
Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications for 304 122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
We present the data release for Galaxy Zoo 2 (GZ2), a citizen science project with more than 16 million morphological classifications of 304 122 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Morphology is a powerful probe for quantifying a galaxy's dynamical history; however, automatic classifications of morphology (either by computer analysis of images or by using other physical parameters as proxies) still have drawbacks when compared to visual inspection. The large number of images available in current surveys makes visual inspection of each galaxy impractical for individual astronomers. GZ2 uses classifications from volunteer citizen scientists to measure morphologies for all galaxies in the DR7 Legacy survey with mr > 17, in addition to deeper images from SDSS Stripe 82. While the original GZ2 project identified galaxies as early-types, late-types or mergers, GZ2 measures finer morphological features. These include bars, bulges and the shapes of edge-on disks, as well as quantifying the relative strengths of galactic bulges and spiral arms. This paper presents the full public data release for the project, including measures of accuracy and bias. The majority (≳90 per cent) of GZ2 classifications agree with those made by professional astronomers, especially for morphological T-types, strong bars and arm curvature. Both the raw and reduced data products can be obtained in electronic format at http://data.galaxyzoo.org.
27456469
Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System
We report the discovery and confirmation of a transiting circumbinary planet (PH1b) around KIC 4862625, an eclipsing binary in the Kepler field. The planet was discovered by volunteers searching the first six Quarters of publicly available Kepler data as part of the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Transits of the planet across the larger and brighter of the eclipsing stars are detectable by visual inspection every ~137 days, with seven transits identified in Quarters 1-11. The physical and orbital parameters of both the host stars and planet were obtained via a photometric-dynamical model, simultaneously fitting both the measured radial velocities and the Kepler light curve of KIC 4862625. The 6.18 ± 0.17 R_⊕ planet orbits outside the 20 day orbit of an eclipsing binary consisting of an F dwarf (1.734 ± 0.044 R_☉, 1.528 ± 0.087 M_☉) and M dwarf (0.378 ± 0.023 R_☉, 0.408 ± 0.024 M_☉). For the planet, we find an upper mass limit of 169 M_⊕ (0.531 Jupiter masses) at the 99.7% confidence level. With a radius and mass less than that of Jupiter, PH1b is well within the planetary regime. Outside the planet's orbit, at ~1000 AU, a previously unknown visual binary has been identified that is likely bound to the planetary system, making this the first known case of a quadruple star system with a transiting planet.