Interaction Technology of jAliEn Client and ALICE Central Services

• Main Authors: Vladimir Korenkov, Andrey Kondratyev, Aleksey Bondyakov
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: The Fund for Promotion of Internet media, IT education, human development «League Internet Media» 2019-09-01
• Series: Современные информационные технологии и IT-образование
• Subjects: middleware; distributed computing environment; alice experiment
• Online Access: http://sitito.cs.msu.ru/index.php/SITITO/article/view/599

This article presents the development of technology for interaction between the client of the jAliEn computing environment and the central services of the ALICE experiment (CERN). This development uses the WebSocket interface to authorize users, create work sessions, and send tasks to central services. The amount of data obtained during this experiment is increasing. To solve this problem, the ALICE experiment not only increases computing resources, but also updates and modifies existing software. The AliEn middleware currently in use by the ALICE experiment is a computing environment built from a variety of open source components. AliEn architecture consists of 99% imported components, and only 1% is the source code. The software includes approximately 200 packages written in the programming language Perl, C and C ++, with two communication channels with central services. jAliEn is a distributed computing environment developed for the ALICE Offline project, which, in the future, will replace the existing AliEn middleware. It allows us to access distributed computing resources, as well as storage resources to all participants in the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Unlike existing middleware, jAliEn is a single package implemented using the high-level Java programming language. This will reduce the complexity of existing software and optimize its operation and maintenance. The developed technology will optimize the work of the jAliEn computing environment, as well as increase its fault tolerance.