Scientists searching for the Higgs boson have profited from Parrot's new support for the CernVM Filesystem (CVMFS), a network filesystem tailored to providing world-wide access to software installations. By using Parrot, CVMFS, and additional components integrated by the Any Data, Anytime, Anywhere project, physicists working in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment have been able to create a uniform computing environment across the Open Science Grid.
Instead of maintaining large software installations at each
participating institution, Parrot is used to provide access to a single
highly-available CVMFS installation of the software from which files are
downloaded as needed and aggressively cached for efficiency. A pilot
project at the University of Wisconsin has demonstrated the feasibility
of this approach by exporting excess compute jobs to run in the Open
Science Grid, opportunistically harnessing 370,000 CPU-hours across 15
sites with seamless access to 400 gigabytes of software in the Wisconsin
CVMFS repository.
- Dan Bradley, University of Wisconsin and the Open Science Grid
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