Speaker
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory, located near Malargüe, Argentina, is the world's largest cosmic-ray detector. It comprises a $3000\:\mathrm{km}^{2}$ surface detector and 27 fluorescence telescopes, which measure the lateral and longitudinal distributions of the many millions of the air-shower particles produced in the interaction of a cosmic ray in the Earth's atmosphere. The determination of the nature of cosmic rays and studies of the detector performances rely on extensive Monte Carlo simulations describing the physics processes occurring in extensive air showers and the detector responses.
The Monte Carlo simulations task aim is to produce and provide the Auger Collaboration with reference libraries used in a wide variety of analyses. All multipurpose detector simulations are currently produced in local clusters using Slurm and HTCondor. The bulk of the shower simulations are produced on the grid, via the Virtual Organization Auger, using the DIRAC middleware. The job submission is made via python scripts using the DIRAC API.
The Auger site is undergoing a major upgrade, which includes the installation of new types of detectors, demanding increased simulation resources. The novel detection of the radio component of extensive air showers is the most challenging endeavor, requiring dedicated shower simulations with very long computation times, not optimized for the grid production.
For data redundancy, the simulations are stored on the Lyon server and the DPM and are accessible to the Auger members via iRODS and DIRAC, respectively. The CVMFS is used for software distribution where, soon, the Auger Offline software will also be made available.
Keywords
Grid usage, VO Auger, High Performance Computing
| Subcategory | Experimental Methods & Instrumentation |
|---|---|
| Collaboration | Auger |
