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Grid Architecture and Implementation
For ALICE Experiment
Jin Huang*, Pablo Saiz**, Latchezar Betev**, Federico Carminati**, Costin Grigoras**,Steffen Schreiner***, Jianlin Zhu*****Research Institute 709, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, Wuhan, 430070, P. R. China** CERN,1211 Geneva,Switzerland*** Technische Universitaet Darmstadt,Germany**** Central China Normal University, Wuhan City, 430074, China
derick0320@gmail.com, pablo.saiz@cern.ch , latchezar.betev@cern.ch, federico.carminati@cern.ch, costin.grigoras@cern.ch,steffen.schreiner@cern.ch, dczhou.iopp@gmail.com, zhujianlin1120@gmail.com
Abstract—According to the requirement of the Physics Data Challenge and many years of experiences from the actual operations, wepropose the Grid Architecture for the ALICE Experiment. This architecture builds on AliEn2 framework and AliEn2 is the gridframework for the whole system’s management and also provides the client interface for accessing the ALICE Grid platform. On thebase of AliEn2, we adopt some middlewares to make the platform more flexible, availability and efficiency. At the end, the whole system
has been worldwide deployed at around 88 sites for distributed production of raw data and Monte Carlo data, detector simulation,reconstruction and real data analysis. We observe the activities of the platform from different point of view and report the performanceof the whole ALICE grid platform. The whole Grid Architecture for ALICE experiment plays an important role in High Energy Physics.
It successfully manages the resources distributed all over the world and has a great efficiency system to make all peoples from and indifferent countries working together. The experiments show the whole system works fine and efficient.

Keyword—AliEn, Grid, Job Management, Middleware, Transfer Management

Dr. Jin Huang. Xianning City, Hubei Province, China. March 20, 1982. He obtained his Bachelor degree in Computer Science from
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huahzong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan City, China in 2004. He obtained
his Master degree in Computer Architecture from School of Computer Science and Technology, Huahzong University of Science andTechnology, Wuhan City, China in 2007. He obtained his PhD degree in Software Engineering from School of Computer Science andTechnology, Huahzong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan City, China in 2012. His research work focuses on grid platform,
aspect-oriented software development, program analysis, aspect mining, aspect refactoring, link analysis. He was a visiting student in
HKUST from September, 2008 to March, 2009. He has been a researcher in ALICE offline group at European Organization for Nuclear
Research(CERN), Switzerland from June, 2010 to August, 2011. The published papers include “Aspect Mining through Link Analysis” atFCST2010, “EXTRACTOR: An extensible framework for identifying Aspect-Oriented Refactoring Opportunities” at ICSEM2011,“Identifying Composite Refactorings with A Scripting Language” at ICCSN2011, “Identifying Composite Crosscutting Concerns with Scatter-Based GraphClustering” at Wuhan University Journal of Natural Sciences 2012,.

Mr. Pablo Saiz. He is a fellow of CERN. His research area is grid systems. The published papers include “AliEn: ALICE Environment on
the Grid”, “AliEn resources brokers”, “Alienfs-a linux file system for the alien grid services”, “Experiment Dashboard: the monitoring system
for the LHC experiments”.

Dr. Latchezar Betev. He is working in the offline team of the ALICE collaboration at CERN and is responsible for the operation of the grid
infrastructure of the experiment.His main interests include large-scale distributed computing and monitoring and control of remote systems.
The published papers include “Monitoring and control of large systems with MonALISA”, “Monitoring, accounting and automated decision
support for the alice experiment based on the MonALISA framework”.

2Dr. Federico Carminati. He obtained the Italian doctors degree in High Energy Physics at the University of Pavia in 1981. After
working as an experimental physicist at CERN, Los Alamos and CalTech, he was hired at CERN were he has been responsible for thedevelopment and support of the CERN Program Library and the GEANT3 detector simulation MonteCarlo. From 1994 to 1998 he has
participated in the design of the Energy Amplifier under the guidance of Prof. C.Rubbia (1984 Nobel Physics Laureate) in the development ofinnovative MonteCarlo techniques for the simulation of accelerator driven fission machines, and of the related fuel cycle. In January 1998 hehas joined the ALICE collaboration at LHC assuming the leadership of the ALICE software and computing project. Since January 2001 he isholding the position of Work Package Manager in the European DataGRID project. He is responsible for the High Energy Physics
Application Work Package whose aim is to deploy large scale distributed HEP applications using the GRID technology.

Dr. Costin Grigoras. He obtained his bachelor and master degree in computer science from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in
2004. He obtained his PhD degree in computer science from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in 2009. He is a fellow at CERN
from March, 2006 to present. He is currently focusing on distributed systems monitoring, automated decision taking and optimizing databases
and code to handle high volumes of data. He is also interested in parallel processing, multicore-aware applications and new technologies ingeneral.

Mr. Steffen Schreiner. He is a PhD candidate in Technische Universitaet Darmstadt,Germany. His research area is security of the distributedsystem. The published papers include “Enhancing the AliEn Web Service Authentication”, “Securing the AliEn File Catalogue”, “A tool for
optimization of the production and user analysis on the Grid” at CHEP2011, “A security architecture for the ALICE grid services” atISGC2012, “A Mediated Definite Delegation Model alowing for Certified Grid Job Submission”, etc.

Jianlin Zhu, Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, China. November 20, 1981. She obtained her Bachelor degree in Computer Science from
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huahzong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan City, China in 2004. She obtained her
Master degree in Computer Architecture from School of Computer Science and Technology, Huahzong University of Science and Technology,Wuhan City, China in 2007. She is currently a Ph.D student in College of Physical Science and Technology, Central China Normal University,Wuhan City, China. Her research work focuses on grid platform, security of distributed system, program analysis.