Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

Martin Sevior, Associate Professor at the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne made a presentation on the use of Cloud computing within the Belle High Energy Physics experiment at VPAC on 24 April 2009. The presentation which is attached was also broadcast via Access Grid.

Pictured: Tom Fifield (left) and Martin Sevior (right) at the VPAC presentation

This presentation was first given to the International Conference of Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics.

Title: "Belle Monte-Carlo production on the Amazon EC2 cloud."

Martin Sevior, Tom Fifield (University of Melbourne) and Nobu Katayama

Abstract:

The SuperBelle project to increase the Luminosity of the KEKB collider by a factor 50 will search for Physics beyond the Standard Model through precision measurements and the investigation of rare processes in Flavour Physics. The data rate expected from the experiment is comparable to a current era LHC experiment with commensurate Computing needs. Incorporating commercial cloud computing, such as that provided the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), into the SuperBelle computing model may provide a lower Total Cost of Ownership for the SuperBelle computing solution.

To investigate this possibility, we have deployed the complete Belle Monte-Carlo simulation chain on EC2 to benchmark the cost and performance of the service. This presentation will describe how this was achieved as well as the bottlenecks and costs of large-scale Monte-Carlo production on EC2.

Biographical details for Martin Sevior

Martin Sevior is Associate Professor at the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. He is a member of the Belle and ATLAS experiments and has been involved with Grid computing since 2001. He is also a core contributor to the Open Source Wordprocessor, AbiWord.

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing is proud to announce the release of three fully functional GPU Nodes on Tango.

These nodes will allow users at VPAC's member universities to trial GPU techniques first hand, with their own code written in the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Each of the nodes will use an NVIDIA GTX 280 GPU which VPAC tested during it's recent 2008/09 Summer Internship program.

The use of these boxes may provide researchers with significant improvements in the speed of their computations.

Information on VPAC's GPU nodes can be found on the GPU Users page.

For further information on submitting jobs to VPACs GPU nodes visit the GPU user tutorials page. This tutorial will provide users with the step by step instructions on running an example solvated HIV protease simulation on a GPU node.

Researchers interested in using VPAC's GPU nodes must have a VPAC HPC account
which they can use to log into the clusters. If you do not have a VPAC HPC account, simply follow the link to apply for an account.

Researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines are invited to participate in eResearch Australasia 2009, to be held 9 - 13 November at the Novotel Manly Pacific, Sydney, Australia. Please see http://www.eresearch.edu.au/participation for further information.

Submissions for presentations, workshops, and BoFs must be received by Monday 29 June 2009. Submissions for posters and live demonstrations must be received by Monday 21 September.

eResearch Australasia 2009 is supported by the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and underwritten by The University of Queensland. More than 400 delegates attended in 2008; see www.eresearch.edu.au/archive .