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DANCE platform at CPPM

The High-Performance Computing platform is a multimodal computing infrastructure for research on massive data. The EGI-INSPIRE project, financed by the European Commission, is the follow-up of the original EGEE projects which were completed in May 2010. The feasibility of a production level computing grid infrastructure was successfully demonstrated. The EGI infrastructure, based on national initiatives NGI France-Grille, provides European industry and research, access with this grid infrastructure, which is already extending over 260 sites in over 50 countries.

DANCE organigram

The project will focus on several primary goals:

  • To combine national, regional and dedicated grids in a single unique infrastructure to serve scientific research and to construct a solid computing grid for commercial research and industry;
  • To continually improve the software quality so as to provide a reliable service to users;
  • To attract new scientific and industrial users by allowing them to discover the great potential offered by the computing grid and to ensure that they receive a high quality of training and support;

The grid makes use of the European Union’s high bandwidth network, GEANT, and exploits the vast expertise accumulated in the many national and international grid projects, past and present.

The CPPM computing departement is running a LCG Tier-2 grid node. The node aims to serve the analysis requirements or the laboratory’s physicists as well as those of other scientific researchers in Marseille, as well as contributing computing and storage elements to the grid. A new project is under study. It should offer a large computing infrastructure (about 2000 cores) and subsequent storage (about 1 PB) to different laboratories located on the Luminy Campus.

The High-Performance Computing infrastructure (mainly Grid computing until now - France-Grille and Tier 2 of LCG France), is developing a Cloud modality for the entire AMU scientific community. This will be possible thanks to an AMU project carried out in collaboration with the AMU HPC mesocentre through CPER and FEDER fundings. The project will set up a shared but distributed platform (Grid and Cloud in Luminy) and HPC (in Saint-Jérôme) accessed in a unified way for AMU users through the DIRAC software. CPPM made major contributions to the design and development of the this kind of systems, DIRAC project, for the LHCb Collaboration. This system now forms the basis for the activities of the Computing and Data team for the research of optimized algorithms for managing computing and storage resources for various scientific applications. In particular, the team focuses on so-called « Big Data » applications with the accent on management large data volumes distributed in multiple centers in the world.