Particle physics requires copious computing resources to extract physics results. Such resources are delivered by various systems: local batch farms, grid sites, private and commercial clouds, and supercomputing centers. Historically, expert knowledge was required to access and concurrently use all these resources efficiently. Fermilab is pursuing a new paradigm in particle physics computing through a single managed portal (“HEPCloud”) that will allow more scientists, experiments, and projects to use more resources to extract more science, without the need for expert knowledge. HEPCloud will provide cost-effective access by optimizing usage across all available types of computing resources and will elastically expand the resource pool on short notice (e.g. by renting temporary resources on commercial clouds). This new elasticity, together with the transparent accessibility of resources, will change the way experiments use computing resources to produce physics results.
The CMS collaboration was amongst the first users of HEPCloud. CMS was able to increase its resources by 50 thousand cores (approximately 1/3 of CMS’s world-wide available resources) by using Amazon Web Services cloud resources through HEPCloud for about one month. This enabled CMS to deliver more physics results for the Moriond conferences in Spring 2016 than were planned with non-HEPCloud resources.
More Information: HEPCloud Project Website