International Science Grid This Week

Issue 96: iSGTW 15 October 2008
Opportunistic storage increases grid job success rate

The DZero high-energy physics experiment at Fermilab, an Open Science Grid user, typically submits 60,000-100,000 jobs per week at 23 sites. The experiment’s application executables make many requests for input data in quick succession. Due to the lack of storage local to the processing sites, up until recently much of DZero’s data had to transfer in real-time over the wide area network, leading to high latencies, job timeouts and job failures.OSG worked with member institutions to allow DZero to use opportunistic storage, that is, idle storage on shared machines, at several sites. This represents the first successful deployment of opportunistic storage on OSG, and opens the door for other OSG Virtual Organizations. With allocations of up to 1 TB at sites where it processes jobs, DZero has increased its job success rate from roughly 30% to upwards of 85%.
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