Understanding and Coping with Hardware and Software Failures in a Very Large Trigger Farm

Document #:

BTeV-doc-1857-v1

Document type:

Proceeding

Submitted by:

Jim Kowalkowski

Updated by:

Jim Kowalkowski

Document Created:

13 Jun 2003, 16:35

Contents Revised:

13 Jun 2003, 16:35

DB Info Revised:

13 Jun 2003, 16:35

Abstract:

When thousands of processors are involved in performing event filtering on a trigger farm, there is likely to be a large number of failures within the software and hardware systems. BTeV, a proton/antiproton collider experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has designed a trigger, which includes several thousand processors. If fault conditions are not given proper treatment, it is conceivable that this trigger system will experience failures at a high enough rate to have a negative impact on its effectiveness. The RTES (Real Time Embedded Systems) collaboration is a group of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists working to address the problem of reliability in large-scale clusters with real-time constraints such as this. Resulting infrastructure must be highly scalable, verifiable, extensible by users, and dynamically changeable.

Files in Document:

• chep2003_rtes_paper (THGT001.doc, 1.3 MB)
• chep2003_rtes_pdf (rtes_thing.pdf, 157.7 kB)

Topics:

• Computing:RTES

Authors:

• Jim Kowalkowski

Keywords:

RTES CHEP2003

Associated with Events:

held from 24 Mar 2003 to 28 Mar 2003 in La Jolla, CA