| DATE | DESCRIPTION | STATUS |
| Mar/Apr '97 | Visit to Caltech by Project Coordinator to pre-view the SPP2000 and discuss detailed plans with Messina's Group and the HEP CMS Group. | Completed |
| Jun '97 | PHASE 0 BEGINS | |
| Jun '97 | Attendance at Objectivity/DB training
course by Project Coordinator and member(s) of Caltech
group(s).
Install Objectivity/DB on the SPP2000. The availability of Objectivity 4.0.2 for HP/UX 10 is promised for before this time.
Install the RD45 program suite on the SPP2000, which includes programs for populating the database, testing associations, generating random events as objects, testing access methods, testing replication. These require the prior installation of Tk/Tcl, CVS and the C++ compiler.
Allow access by Objectivity engineer(s) to the HPSS client library at Caltech, for testing purposes. |
Rick Wilkinson attended the Objectivity
course in Mountain View July 7-9th., paid by Caltech/HEP.
Julian Bunn used the tutorial, printed and online manuals
to teach himself.
Objectivity was installed on the Exemplar on 21st. April 1997.
The RD45 program suite was not available as a portable package. Instead, a new application was developed by Julian Bunn and Roy Williams which allowed the investigation of database population, object associations, random object member generation, access methods, selection methods, replication schemes and various other scaling parameters.
The RD45 collaboration preferred to do this work with SLAC. The Caltech HPSS system was, however, used for various tests with the NFS interface. These tests were asked for by RD45 and the PDP group. |
| Jun '97 | Present Project status at CMS week in CERN (23/6-27/6) | A presentation was made to the CMS Software and Computing Technical board, on 19th. June. |
| Jul '97 | Begin performance studies work: Population of DB (>100 GBytes disk space will be available for tests). Functionality tests. Comparison with RD45/DEC benchmark results (already available by end March '97) on the "impact of using an ODBMS for the physical organisation of the data". SMP scalability (machine partitions, replication between partitions, large numbers of servers and clients working concurrently), large memory caching, container placement and size, locking. This will require one or more visits by RD45 experts. The above performance studies continue throughout subsequent phases. |
The performance studies were begun, and
the results so far are fully documented on the GIOD Web
pages. In addition, the results were presented at a
variety of meetings. In particular, we have measured scalability of analysis tasks as a function of the number of simultaneous clients (up to 158 clients on 158 CPUs). These tests extended some made at CERN with a 6-CPU machine. We have explored the creation of large databases using Objectivity and Versant. With Objectivity, we were able to create a federation of 32000 databases before hitting an Objectivity software limit that prevented us from creating more. We noted increasingly longer database creation times as the size of the federation increased. We were unable to access federations containing more than about 20000 databases due to another Objectivity software limit. With Versant, we succeeded in creating 3000 shared databases before running out of space on the disk used for these tests. We have also installed the complete OO CMS analysis environment for the H2 and X5 test beam work. A replica of the H2 test beam data was made at Caltech. We define a new milestone for installation and analysis of, a replica of the X5 data. The X5 data is from tests of the CMS tracker modules: the set-up is more stable than that in H2. We will develop Java-based GUIs to the database, and attempt to re-implement in Java the required C++ methods, and evaluate the usability of the Java interface for analysing and displaying the tracker module data. |
| Sep '97 | REVIEW PHASE 0 PHASE 1 BEGINS |
Julian Bunn visited CERN at the end of September, and presented the status of the project to the DPG, the RD45/HPSS meeting, and in various other forums. There were private discussions between Julian Bunn, Jurgen May, Les Robertson, Jamie Shiers, Tony Osborne, Fabrizio Gagliardi during this week, to review progress and help define new goals for the Project. |
| Sep '97 | Caltech staff to install and test CMSIM and set up batch queues for CMSIM production. Acquire disk space for production runs. Start testing CMSIM production in around 10% of available capacity, and then full production in the background on the SPP2000. Production continues throughout subsequent phases. | The CMSIM program was ported and optimised for the Exemplar. By December 1997, over 1 million events had been generated on the machine as part of an ECAL efficiency study. This work was primarily carried out by Rick Wilkinson and Sergey Shevchenko of Caltech. |
| Sep '97 | Present Project status at CMS Week in Madison (15/9-19/9) | The project was introduced and reviewed as one of the main sessions during CMS week, |
| Nov '97 | Install ODBMS on Caltech in-house AIX and SGI systems, and test it over LANs in the Gbits/sec range. | This was done earlier in the year,
although on HP and NT workstations. The results are
documented fully on the GIOD Web pages. The speed of the
LAN, however, was not in the Gbits/sec range. A new milestone is defined that involves using a dedicated 155 Mbits/sec ATM fibre between the Exemplar and an HP C200 workstation. We will investigate database object access across ATM as a function of bandwidth, object sizes, database size, database location, and so on. Emulate a possible future WAN connection by simulating various traffic patterns on the ATM link. |
| Dec '97 | REVIEW PHASE 1 Present Project status to RD45 and CMS at CERN (8/12 - 12/12) (CMS Week) PHASE 2 BEGINS |
The project status was presented during
the RD45 workshop. There will also be a presentation
during the CMS week.
|
| Jan/Feb '98 | With Objectivity engineer, PDP expert and assistance from CACR, integrate the Objectivity/DB as a client for the HPSS. This assumes that the basic Objectivity HPSS support is available. | We expect to obtain shortly the AMS interface to HPSS from Objectivity and SLAC. This will be installed on the CACR SP2 (a 24 node machine). We will thus be participating actively in the AMS/HPSS field test. We intend to check the HPSS cache hit rate, and define policies for object placement in the whole system. |
| Jan/Feb '98 | Install and test LHC++ and CMS OO environment, including IRIS Explorer. Install GEANT4, preferably with CMS geometry, if available, and make tests using Objectivity/DB as the event store. Ensure LHC++ environment functions correctly with the ODBMS. Make comparison tests with PAW and nTuples? | We intend to install LHC++ on the
Exemplar, and to assist with porting it to Windows/NT
(our primary desktop OS). A new milestone is defined related to our identification of a strong need to have available the CMS geometry defined in GEANT4. This will be worked on at Caltech, in collaboration with the people responsible in CMS for the current CMSIM. In particular, the geometry of CMS will be converted from GEANT3 format to GEANT4 using a standard tool. Once this work is complete, we intend to populate an Objectivity database with simulated events, and explore the development of simple reconstruction algorithms which work with a minimal set of space point information. This database will be populated with a large number of events, and scaling behaviour explored. We have no current plans to compare our results with nTuples, although this decision could be revised if required. |
| Jan/Feb '98 | Report on results of ODBMS performance studies started in Jul '97 and contrast with results from RD45/DEC. | To be done. |
| Jan/Feb '98 | Install, test and re-evaluate all components of the environment after the SPP upgrade to 384-512 nodes (if available). This would require visits by PDP and RD45 experts. Initiate new performance and scaling studies. | Presently (December 1997) there is a
second Exemplar (of 128 CPUs) installed at CACR,
alongside the Exemplar we have been using. It is possible
that the two machines will be merged, yielding a machine
of 384 CPUs. If this occurs, then this work item will be
carried out. We define a new milestone of extending our tests with multiple database clients from the present level (158 clients, see above), with the intent of reaching a target of 500 clients, if possible. |
| Jan/Feb '98 | Implement networked ODBMS over OC12 WAN with the peer machine at SDSC and make scalability and head-to-head comparison tests. | For this work item, we in fact prefer to
concentrate in this time frame on our tests with 155
Mbits/sec ATM (see above). We do, however, still intend
to use the peer machine at SDSC as described. In this area, in collaboration with RD45, we have made Object database replication tests between CERN and Caltech using Objectivity/DB. We will extend these tests to include SDSC peer machine. RD45 have also asked us to explore the behaviour of client applications that use the replicas, when the replicas contain references to external objects. In this context, RD45 have also requested that we work with the BaBar experiment to investigate and test replication schemes for BaBar data by using the Objectivity FTO and DRO options. |
| Mar '98 | REVIEW PHASE 2 | |
| Mid '98 | PHASE 3 BEGINS Connectivity trials between Caltech and CERN and other large LHC centres. Replication tests. Caching tests. |
These trials are still planned. |
| Mid '98 | Test full model implementation targetting CMS as client. The detailed work plan defined in the Phase 2 review begins. | Still planned. |
| May/Jun '99 | Install ODBMS on SPP3000. Test performance according to criteria established earlier in the Project. Compare the performance on this smaller, high performance, next generation system, with the SPP2000. Evaluate the system in-house and as a networked centre with SDSC and/or other sites with multi-TFLOPS power. | Still planned. |
| Mid '99 | REVIEW PHASE 3 CONSIDER FOLLOW-ON PHASES AS APPROPRIATE END '97 - '99 PROJECT |