The nuclear physics group at the Instituto de Fisica da Universidade de Sao Paulo (from left): Marcelo Munhoz
Jun Takahashi, Mauro Cosentino, Karin Guimaraes, Alexandre Suaide and Marcia de Moura.
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Students, postdocs and faculty at the Instituto de Fisica da Universidade de Sao Paulo will soon use the grid to study the quark-gluon plasma—a state of matter formed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The plasma is re-created in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator located almost 5000 miles away at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The Sao Paulo physicists are part of an international collaboration of more than 600 physicists and skilled specialists using the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC detector. The Sao Paulo group already leads two STAR detector subsystems and is active in a broad range of physics areas, and they now join BNL and the Parallel Distributed Systems Facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the experiment's distributed computing infrastructure, the STAR GRID.
"The grid is the best way to share resources," said Professor Alexandre Suaide from Universidade de Sao Paulo. "Right now almost the whole collaboration connects to the BNL computer farm to do data analysis, so it is often very heavily loaded. Very soon we will upgrade our own computer farm with more processors and a large storage capacity, and we intend to be fully integrated in the grid, running simulations, reconstruction and analysis for the entire collaboration."
Users of the STAR GRID are already experimenting with data analysis on the grid. The STAR GRID allows collaborators to analyze data using their own computer resources, by copying important—and very large, an average of 5.5 terabytes of data per month—data sets from BNL to other sites soon after they are collected by the detector. Users will also be able to access additional resources through the grid infrastructure. The STAR GRID computing team provides a lightweight grid infrastructure and services targeted for all users, from those who have only a few computing nodes to those who have large computing farms.
In joining the STAR GRID, Sao Paulo became the first international nuclear physics site to join the Open Science Grid, a nationwide grid computing infrastructure that brings together several scientific communities.
"Our physics program is very demanding, and needs computing resources beyond our capacity at BNL," said Jerome Lauret, STAR software and computing leader. "Until now we had used the grid only for simulation, but we are at a crossroads where our user community and institutions seem willing to try using the grid for analysis. We hope the success of the Sao Paulo group will show other institutions that it is not difficult to set up a STAR/Open Science Grid site."
Learn more at the University of Sao Paulo's Institute of Physics Web site and the
STAR Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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