Introduction
This document attempts to summarize what summarizes the work and resources that would be needed to make an effective EXO-200 analysis environment on the SRCF computing facility, under the assumption that this needs to be done without the user doing the analysis needing a SLAC account.
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In the following discussion we have assumed that the user is able to get an SRCF account and compute resources through EXO's affiliation with Stanford (Giorgio Gratta, PI).
Access to documentation and web applications
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The EXO-200 data is currently stored on SLAC servers with private IP addresses. There are several possible ways of making the data available at SRCF
- Copy the entire data set. This has the disadvantage the considerable disk space would be required at SRCF (currently ~150TB). This would also require some mechanism for synchronizing the data when it is updated at SLAC (a frequent occurrence).
- Give (a subset) of the SRCF computers direct access to the EXO-200 data at SLAC. This would require using the (existing but currently unused?) fiber between building 50 and SRCF, and configuring some kind of trusted access between the computer centers
- Use the same xrootd access that we currently use to make the EXO data accessible at NERSC. This would almost certainly work, but may require more work than option 2, and may not give such good performance. We also need to understand the data access limitations on the SRCF batch farm and ensure that it can access the SLAC proxy server (or perhaps run a second data access node at SRCF).
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- Access to data (see above)
- Create EXO group account for installing software
- Set up automatic builds of EXO software using Jenkins continuous integration system.
- Scratch space for storage of results
Resources required: Server at SRCF to run Jenkins, plus disk space for builds (~200GB). Work required to set up server, and verify that EXO software runs as expected ~1 week. Scratch space and batch cycles as needed for the analysis in question.
Conclusion
Setting up such a facility does seem possible, and would require fairly modest resources, but nonetheless these resources would need to be identified (presumably with some budget code to cover the work). In addition to ensure the required work happens in a timely way some effort would need to be put into spearheading and coordinating the work.
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