HEP Analyses on Dynamically Allocated Opportunistic Computing Resources

The current experiments in high energy physics (HEP) have a huge data rate. To convert the measured data, an enormous number of computing resources is needed and will further increase with upgraded and newer experiments. To fulfill the ever-growing demand the allocation of additional, potentially only temporary available non-HEP dedicated resources is important. These so-called opportunistic resources cannot only be used for analyses in general but are also well-suited to cover the typical unpredictable peak demands for computing resources. For both use cases, the temporary availability of the opportunistic resources requires a dynamic allocation, integration, and management, while their heterogeneity requires optimization to maintain high resource utilization by allocating best matching resources. To find the best matching resources which should be allocated is challenging due to the unpredictable submission behavior as well as an ever-changing mixture of workflows with different requirements.
Instead of predicting the best matching resource, we base our decisions on the utilization of resources. For this reason, we are developing the resource manager TARDIS (Transparent Adaptive Resource Dynamic Integration System) which manages and dynamically requests or releases resources. ... mehrThe decision of how many resources TARDIS has to request is implemented in COBalD (COBald - The Opportunistic Balancing Daemon) to ensure further allocation of well-used resources while reducing the amount of insufficiently used ones. TARDIS allocates and manages resources from various resource providers such as HPC centers or commercial and public clouds while ensuring a dynamic allocation and efficient utilization of these heterogeneous opportunistic resources.
Furthermore, TARDIS integrates the allocated opportunistic resources into one overlay batch system which provides a single point of entry for all users. In order to provide the dedicated HEP software environment, we use virtualization and container technologies.
In this contribution, we give an overview of the dynamic integration of opportunistic resources via TARDIS/COBalD in our HEP institute as well as how user analyses benefit from these additional resources.