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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

The recent decade of investigating deep inelastic scattering at very small Bjorken $`x`$ at HERA has provided precise data for the $`F_2`$ structure function or equivalently for $`\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}p}`$ at large center-of-mass energies. Many phenomenological analyses have been performed in order to fit the data. The theoretical analyses can be divided into two general classes. One group of models tries to fit the data using the so-called dipole representation. In this approach, initiated by Nikolaev and Zakharov , one fits parameters of the dipole-nucleon interaction  as a function of the transverse quark-antiquark distance. Another group of models uses rather the momentum representation . Still another approach  tries to fit the so-called unintegrated gluon distributions to the HERA data (see also ).

The fits in the dipole representation take into account only a simple quark-antiquark Fock component of the photon. However, the higher Fock components seem to be important to understand the diffraction  in detail. The importance of the higher Fock states is at present not fully understood. The first theoretical step in going beyond the $`q\overline{q}`$ component has been undertaken only recently . However, no quantitative estimates exist up to now. Only a very schematic QCD-inspired model was considered in Ref.. On the phenomenological side, the jet production in virtual-photon-proton scattering, especially at small photon virtuality, shows clearly the presence of the resolved photon component (see e.g. ) which seems impossible to be explained with the quark-antiquark component only. The ratio of the dijet cross section with $`x_\gamma ^{OBS}<`$ 0.75 (resolved component) to that with $`x_\gamma ^{OBS}>`$ 0.75 (direct component) has been found to increase as $`Q^2`$ decreases. The variable $`x_\gamma ^{OBS}`$ is to be interpreted as the fractional momentum of the photon taking part in the dijet production. At large photon virtuality the resolved photon component disappears. The observed $`Q^2`$ dependence of the resolved photon component is roughly consistent with the naive VDM form factor . The present NLO calculations of jet and dijet production include these phenomenological form factors when going from real to virtual photons (see e.g. ). Such a phenomenological factor is then prescribed to the structure of virtual photon, and more precisely to the parton distributions in the virtual photon. The resolved photon component seems also crucial for understanding the world data for the $`F_2^p(x,Q^2)F_2^n(x,Q^2)`$ . All these arguments put into question the simple fits to the total photon-nucleon cross section with the colour dipole component alone, and call for a multi-component parametrization.

In the light of the extremely successful phenomenological description in Ref. it is interesting to see if any phenomenological two-component model can do a better job. It is the aim of this note to analyze phenomenologically if such a two-component model can satisfactorily describe the HERA data for the photon-proton total cross section. In our exploratory analysis, the higher Fock components are parametrized by the standard vector dominance cross section, i.e. our model is similar in spirit to the Badełek-Kwieciński model .

## 2 Formulation of the model

It is known that the LO total $`\gamma ^{}N`$ cross section in the so-called dipole or mixed representation can be written in the form

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}=\underset{q}{}𝑑zd^2\rho \sigma _{T,L}|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\gamma ^{}q\overline{q}}^{T,L}(Q,z,\rho )|^2\sigma _{(q\overline{q})N}(x,\rho ).$$
(1)
In this paper we take the so-called quark-antiquark photon wave function of perturbative form . As usual, in order to correct the photon wave function for large dipole sizes (nonperturbative region) we introduce an effective quark/antiquark mass ($`m_{eff}=m_0`$).

The dipole representation (1) has been used in recent years to fit the virtual photon - nucleon total cross section . The best fit has been achieved in the saturation model of Golec-Biernat-Wüsthoff . In their approach the dipole-nucleon cross section was parametrized as

$$\sigma (x,\rho )=\sigma _0\left[1\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{\rho ^2}{4R_0^2(x)}\right)\right],$$
(2)
where the Bjorken $`x`$ dependent radius $`R_0`$ is given by

$$R_0(x)=\frac{1}{1GeV}\left(\frac{x}{x_0}\right)^{\lambda /2}.$$
(3)
Model parameters (normalization constant $`\sigma _0`$ and parameters $`x_0`$ and $`\lambda `$) have been determined by the fit to the inclusive data on $`F_2`$ for $`x<`$ 0.01 .

In the GBW approach, the dipole-nucleon cross section is parametrized as a function of Bjorken $`x`$. As discussed in , it would be useful to have rather a parametrization in the gluon longitudinal momentum fraction $`x_gx`$ instead of the Bjorken $`x`$. Then one could use the unintegrated gluon distribution which is related to the dipole-nucleon cross section as

$`\sigma _{(q\overline{q})N}(x_g,\rho )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4\pi }{3}}{\displaystyle \frac{d^2\kappa _t}{\kappa _t^2}\left[1\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{\kappa _t}\stackrel{}{\rho })\right]\alpha _s(x_g,\kappa _t^2)}`$ (4)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4\pi ^2}{3}}{\displaystyle \frac{d\kappa _t^2}{\kappa _t^2}\left[1J_0(\kappa _t\rho )\right]\alpha _s(x_g,\kappa _t^2)}.`$
Therefore, we find it more appropriate to parametrize the dipole-nucleon cross section as $`x_g`$ instead of the Bjorken $`x`$. This involves the following replacement in Eq.(2)

$$\sigma (x,\rho )\sigma (x_g,\rho ),$$
(5)
which means also a replacement of $`x`$ by $`x_g`$ in Eq.(3). As discussed in , an exact calculation of $`x_g`$ in the dipole representation is, however, not possible, and we approximate $`x_g(M_{qq}^2+Q^2)/(W^2+Q^2)`$, where $`M_{qq}^2=m_q^2/(z(1z))`$ with $`m_q`$ being effective quark mass $`m_q=m_0`$ for $`u/\overline{u}`$ and $`d/\overline{d}`$ (anti)quarks and $`m_q=m_0+`$ 0.15 GeV for $`s/\overline{s}`$ (anti)quarks. This means that in our approach the dipole-nucleon cross section $`\sigma _{(q\overline{q})N}=\sigma (W,Q^2,z,\rho )`$. This must be contrasted to the approach of Ref., where there is no $`z`$ dependence of $`\sigma _{(q,\overline{q})N}`$.

Including higher Fock components of the (virtual) photon, one could write somewhat schematically:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\hfill \sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}=& \underset{q}{}𝑑\mathrm{\Omega }_2|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\gamma ^{}q\overline{q}}(\omega _2)|^2\sigma _{(q\overline{q})N}(\omega _2)\hfill \\ \hfill +& \underset{q}{}𝑑\mathrm{\Omega }_3|\mathrm{\Psi }_{\gamma ^{}q\overline{q}g}(\omega _3)|^2\sigma _{(q\overline{q}g)N}(\omega _3)\hfill \\ \hfill +& \mathrm{}\mathrm{}.\hfill \end{array}$$
(6)
The differentials above $`d\mathrm{\Omega }_2`$ and $`d\mathrm{\Omega }_3`$ represent phase space volumes for the $`q\overline{q}`$ and $`q\overline{q}g`$ components, respectively, and $`\omega _2`$, $`\omega _3`$ represent the corresponding sets of kinematical variables necessary to describe the relevant process. The second and all subsequent terms are of the type of a resolved photon. A rigorous approach to the problem is rather difficult  and has not been pursued numerically.

We shall not try to follow the theoretical path sketched above. Our aim here is somewhat different. We intend to construct a simple two-component model. One component of our phenomenological model is the dipole $`q\overline{q}`$ component, while the other one is meant to represent the resolved photon explicitly. Trying to keep our model as simple as possible and inspired by the phenomenological results mentioned in the introduction, we wish to check if the standard vector dominance model (VDM) contribution can be a reasonable representation of the resolved photon. Our approach should not be understood as a replacement of the missing terms in Eq.(6). In our opinion, the VDM contribution under consideration contains nonperturbative terms which cannot be easily generated by the formal expansion (6). However, as already mentioned in the introduction, in many exclusive processes the VDM contribution represents phenomenologically the resolved photon fairly well.

The cross section for the VDM component, equivalently called here the resolved photon component, is calculated in the standard way

$$\sigma _{\gamma ^{}N}^{VDM}(W,Q^2)=\underset{V}{}\frac{4\pi }{\gamma _V^2}\frac{M_V^4\sigma _{tot}^{VN}(W)}{(Q^2+M_V^2)^2}(1x).$$
(7)
We take the simplest diagonal version of VDM with $`\rho `$, $`\omega `$ and $`\varphi `$ mesons included. As discussed recently in , the contributions of higher vector states are expected to be damped. Above the meson-nucleon resonances it is reasonable to approximate

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\rho N}=\sigma _{tot}^{\omega N}=\frac{1}{2}\left[\sigma _{tot}^{\pi ^+p}+\sigma _{tot}^{\pi ^{}p}\right],$$
(8)
with a similar expression for $`\sigma _{\varphi p}^{tot}`$ . A simple Regge parametrization of the experimental pion-nucleon cross section by Donnachie and Landshoff is used . As in , we take $`\gamma `$’s calculated from the leptonic decays of vector mesons, including finite-width corrections. The factor (1-x) is meant to extend the VDM contribution towards larger Bjorken $`x`$.

## 3 Fit to the HERA data

In the previous section we presented formulae for the virtual photon - nucleon cross section. The relation between $`\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}`$ and $`F_2`$ is a matter of convention. In the so-called Hand convention one obtains

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)=\frac{4\pi ^2\alpha _{em}}{Q^2(1x)}\left(1+\frac{4M_N^2x^2}{Q^2}\right)F_2(x,Q^2).$$
(9)
If the Gilman convention is used instead, then

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)=\frac{4\pi ^2\alpha _{em}}{Q^2}\sqrt{1+\frac{4M_N^2x^2}{Q^2}}F_2(x,Q^2).$$
(10)
We transform the structure function data from  in the standard but approximate way 111Both prescription (9) and (10) converge to the standard formula below in the limit of small $`x`$.

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)=\frac{4\pi ^2\alpha _{em}}{Q^2}F_2(x,Q^2).$$
(11)
Then we perform two independent fits to the HERA data. In fit 1, only dipole nucleon interaction is included (see Eq.(1))

$$FIT1:\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}=\sigma _{dip}^{\gamma ^{}N}.$$
(12)
In fit 2 in addition we include the resolved photon component in the spirit of the vector meson dominance model (see Eq.(7))

$$FIT2:\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}=\sigma _{dip}^{\gamma ^{}N}+\sigma _{VDM}^{\gamma ^{}N}.$$
(13)
In these fits we limit to 0.15 GeV2 $`<Q^2<`$ 10 GeV2. The upper limit is dictated by the simplicity of our model. It is known that at large photon virtualities one has to include QCD evolution , which is ignored in the present analysis for simplicity. The maximal Bjorken $`x`$ in the data sample included in our fit is 0.021, and minimal W = 17.4 GeV. With the selection criterion specified, we select 159 experimental data points.

In Table 1 we present the model parameters obtained from the fit. The region of small $`Q^2`$ is sensitive to the value of the effective quark mass. This nonperturbative parameter is related e.g. to the confinement and cannot be obtained from the first principles. Therefore, in the table we show results with different values of this parameter. From the fit we find $`\sigma _0^{fit1}\sigma _0^{fit2}`$ for the same value of the effective quark mass. We have extended the range of effective quark masses in fit 2 (dipole+VDM). A good quality fit can be obtained in the broad range of $`m_0`$. The $`\chi ^2`$ criterion by itself does not allow one to answer the question which set of parameters is better. The value of the $`\chi ^2`$ per degree of freedom is shown in the last column. The value of $`\chi ^2`$ in fit 2 (dipole+VDM) is much smaller than that in fit 1 (dipole only), which is not acceptable statistically. This can be taken as the evidence for resolved photon component.

In order to illustrate how well the model parameters can be determined from the fit to experimental data, in Fig.1 we show two-dimensional maps of $`\chi ^2`$ in both cases. Here $`m_0`$ = 0.15 GeV and 0.20 GeV was taken for fit1 and fit2, respectively. Well defined minima are clearly seen. It can be seen from Table 1 and Fig.1 that the parameter $`x_0`$ changes dramatically when the VDM component is included, while $`\lambda `$ stays almost the same.

The quality of the fit can be judged by inspecting Figs.2 \- 5. Since there is a rather weak dependence of the cross section on $`W`$, therefore in the figures showing $`Q^2`$ dependence both theoretical curves and experimental points are rescaled by an extra factor 2n, where $`n`$ counts the subsequent subsets of data of a given $`W`$ shown in Fig.3 and 5. Only the cross sections for the lowest energy chosen (W = 18 GeV) are left unchanged. By careful inspection of the figures one can see the superiority of the fit 2. In presenting the results we have made an arbitrary choice of $`m_0`$. The results for other sets of parameters (different $`m_0`$) are almost indistinguishable in the range of the fit. They differ somewhat, however, outside the range of the fit where no experimental data are available. The theoretical curves with dipole component only underestimate somewhat the low $`Q^2`$ data. We wish to stress that the quality of our fit 1 is worse than that of the original saturation model of Golec-Biernat-Wüsthoff . We conclude, therefore, that parameterizing the dipole-nucleon cross section as a function of the Bjorken $`x`$, instead of $`x_g`$, is essential for the good quality of the fit in Ref..

Having shown that a good-quality two-component fit to the HERA data with very small number of parameters is possible, we wish to show a decomposition of the cross section into the two model components. In Fig.6 and Fig.7 we show separate contributions of both components as a function of $`W`$\- and $`Q^2`$, respectively. While at low energy the VDM contribution dominates due to the subleading reggeon exchange, at higher energies they are of comparable size. The VDM contribution, being a higher twist effect, dominates at small values of photon virtualities. At larger $`Q^2`$ the dipole component becomes dominant. This effect is almost independent of energy.

Up to now we have concentrated on very low-x region relevant for DIS at HERA. It is interesting to check what happens if we go to somewhat larger Bjorken $`x`$ or smaller energies $`W`$. In this region one cannot neglect the valence quark contribution to the cross section. Then the cross section is a sum of three components:

$$\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)=\sigma _{dip}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)+\sigma _{VDM}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2)+\sigma _{val}^{\gamma ^{}N}(W,Q^2),$$
(14)
where the last component is calculated according to Eq.(11) with

$$F_2(x,Q^2)\stackrel{~}{F}_2(x,Q^2)=\frac{Q^2}{Q^2+Q_0^2}\left(\frac{4}{9}xu_{val}(x,Q^2)+\frac{1}{9}xd_{val}(x,Q^2)\right).$$
(15)
We freeze $`Q^2`$ below $`Q_{min}^2`$ = 0.25 GeV. In the present calculation we take the leading order valence quark distributions from Ref.. The $`Q^2`$-dependent factor in front of the r.h.s. of Eq.(15) is necessary when extrapolating the quark contribution to the non-DIS, low-$`Q^2`$ region (see e.g.). The parameter $`Q_0^2`$ (=0.8 GeV2) is taken from a global analysis of the experimental data in . In Fig. 8 we compare predictions of our two models (fits) also with fixed target data . The fixed target data are represented by solid symbols, while the HERA data by open circles. Formula (11) is used to calculate both experimental and theoretical $`\sigma _{tot}^{\gamma p}`$ cross sections. A better agreement is obtained with model 2 (dipole+VDM), especially at $`Q^2`$ 3 - 5 GeV2, i.e. for the NMC data. An overestimation of model 2 at small energies and small photon virtualities may be caused by neglecting a form factor responsible for correcting the VDM contribution for finite times of hadronic fluctuations . Summarizing, there is a phenomenological evidence for the presence of the resolved photon component from the analysis of experimental data for $`F_2`$ in consistency with exclusive reactions.

## 4 Conclusions

Recent fits to the total $`\gamma ^{}p`$ cross section in the literature include only the quark-antiquark component in the Fock decomposition of the photon wave function. The contribution of the higher Fock components, neglected so far, is not known and difficult to calculate consistently within quantum chromodynamics. The first trials to include the $`q\overline{q}g`$ Fock component within perturbative QCD have not be quantified in the literature. Nonperturbative effects, not easy to implement within the framework mentioned, can be also expected. It is known from the phenomenology of the exclusive reactions that the traditional vector dominance model in many cases gives a good estimate of the effects characteristic for resolved photon. In this note we have analyzed if a two-component model, which includes the $`q\overline{q}`$ component and the more complicated components replaced by the standard VDM, can provide a good description of the HERA data for $`\gamma ^{}p`$ scattering.

In order to quantify the effect of the resolved photon we have performed two different fits to the HERA data. In fit No.1 we include only the dipole component. Here we have used the flexible and successful parametrization of Golec-Biernat and Wüsthoff. In comparison to their fit, in our fit we parametrize the dipole-nucleon cross section in terms of a variable which is closer to the gluon longitudinal momentum fraction $`x_g`$ than to the Bjorken $`x`$. Such a fit is useful on its own, as the corresponding unintegrated gluon distribution can be used to estimate cross sections for many exclusive processes. In fit No.2, in addition we include the VDM component while keeping the same functional form of parametrization for the dipole-nucleon interaction. A better fit is obtained if the resolved photon component of the type of VDM is included. When going to slightly larger Bjorken $`x`$, the model must be supplemented for valence quark contribution. If this is done, the model describes also the fixed target data quite well. The two models give different predictions in the regions of the phase space where no experimental data are available.

Our phenomenological analysis is only a first step towards a better understanding of the role which the higher Fock components of the photon play in both inclusive and exclusive processes. The relation of the phenomenological VDM contribution to the formal expansion discussed in the paper requires further study. A numerical calculation of higher-order pQCD effects is called for to start addressing this question quantitatively.

Acknowledgments We are indebted to Jan Kwieciński for a useful discussion, and Krzysztof Golec-Biernat for a discussion and files with experimental data.


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# GridMonitor: Integration of Large Scale Facility Fabric Monitoring with Meta Data Service in Grid EnvironmentThis work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

## I Introduction

Grid computing consists of large sets of diverse, geographically distributed resources that are collected into a virtual computer for high performance computation. The success of the Grid depends greatly on efficient utilization of these resource. The Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG) is an example user of the data Grid. PPDG is a collaboration of computer scientists in distributed computing and Grid technology, and physicists who work on the major high-energy and nuclear physics experiments. These experiments include ATLAS, STAR, CMS, D0, and Babar. There are many computing resources involved in PPDG physics experiments. For example, the computing resources at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) includes 1100 dual processor PCs which come from six different vendors. The Linux farms at the BNL RHIC/USATLAS provide 3.115 TFlops of computation power. The storage system provides 140 Tera-Bytes of disk space and 1.2 Peta-Bytes of robotic tape storage space. The diversity of these computing resources and their large number of users make the Grid environment vulnerable to faults and excessive loads. This seriously affects the utilization of Grid resources. Therefore, it is crucial to get knowledge about the status of all types of computing resources and services to enhance the performance and avoid faults.

Here we give an example to illustrate how a Grid application relies on Grid information service. A job scheduler needs information about available CPU resources in order to plan the efficient execution of tasks. A computing farm consists of a set of many hosts available for scheduling via Grid resource management protocols. If required by the exact nature of the interrelationship between the farm monitor and the job scheduler, the hosts at a given site may be broken down into multiple clusters that consist of homogeneous nodes, such that the local job manager can assume that any queued job can be run on any available node within the computing farm. Grid information service should provide the system status about each cluster, i.e. cluster configuration, associated storage system, and so on.

Many applications, fault detection, performance analysis, performance tuning, prediction, and schedule need information about the Grid environment. Good methods need to be designed to monitor resource usage, get the performance information and detect the potential failures. Due to the complexity of the Grid, implementing a monitoring system for such a large scale computing resource is not a trivial task. The targets to be monitored in Grid resource include CPU usage, disk usage, and network performance of Grid nodes. The ability to monitor and manage distributed computing components is critical for enabling high-performance distributed computing. Monitoring data is needed to determine the source of performance problems and to tune the system and application for better performance. Fault detecting and recovery mechanisms need monitoring data to determine where the problem is, what is the problem and why it happens. A performance prediction service might use monitoring data as inputs for a prediction model, which would in turn be used by a scheduler to determine which resources to use. As more people use the Grid, more instrumentation needs will be discovered, and more facility status needs to be monitored. Many researchers are focused on monitoring computer facility in a relatively small scale. The proposed systems are Autopilot RVSR98 , Network Weather services WSH99 , Netlogger Netlogger97 , Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) TCGLT2001  and Grid Information Service (MDS) CFFK2001 .

Due to the diversity of the computing resource and applications in Grid computing, existing monitoring architectures can not monitor all of the computing resources belonging to the Grid. When the size of a computing facility grows, the existing monitoring strategy will significantly increase the system overhead. The dynamic characteristics of the Grid allows the computing resources to participate and withdraw from the resource pool constantly. Only a few existing monitoring systems address this characteristic. In this work, we present a Grid monitoring system which is adaptive to the Grid environment. It includes:

* Local monitoring: The local monitoring system monitors the facility which consists of computing, storage and network resources. The monitored information will be provided to different types of application with different requirements.
* Grid monitoring: it uses MDS CFFK2001  to publish the selected monitoring information into the Grid system.

The proposed architecture can separate the facility monitoring from the Grid environment. By using the MDS, it provides a well-designed interface between the Grid and the facility. It can provide monitoring information for different Grid applications as long they use the Grid information protocols. When new hardware is added to the local facility, the local monitoring infrastructure can easily add the new software to monitor the system. The change of hardware and monitoring tools can be hidden from the Grid computing environment.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II provide the architecture of Grid Monitoring. Section III summarizes recent work on Grid monitoring and Grid information service. Section IV summarizes our conclusions and the scope of future work.

## II Grid Monitoring Architecture

In this section, we specify the system requirements of Grid monitoring, provide the Grid monitoring infrastructure, and describe the design of each component in the system.

### II.1 System Requirements

Due to the complexity and dynamics of the Grid computing model, the monitoring toolkits built on top of this computing model are also complex. To build an efficient and effective monitoring model, the designers and developers need to keep the following requirements in mind.

* The Monitoring toolkits can make use of existing monitoring tools. The overhead for incorporating a monitor tool should be minimum. The Grid monitoring system should make use of existing facility infrastructures with well designed API, not force its own.
* Scalability: the system for monitoring and fault management should be scalable. The number of Grid nodes will increase every year in order to satisfy the growing computing requirement of HENP. The monitoring system should be scalable for the expanding Grid system.
* Flexibility: the system for monitoring should be flexible because the target to be monitored and the Grid architecture are likely to change over time.
* Extensibility and Modularity should be implemented, which allows users to include those components easily that they wish to use. All Communication flows should not flow through a single central component. Having a single, centralized repository for dynamic data causes two performance problems. The centralized repository for information represents a single-point-failure for the entire system. The centralized server can create a performance bottleneck.
* Non-intrusiveness: the Grid monitoring system should incur as small a system overhead as possible. It should not disrupt the normal running of the monitored system. This is extremely important if a large number of target systems are monitored.
* Security: typically, an organization defines policies controlling who can access information about their resource. The monitoring system must comply with these policies.
* Ability of logging: Some important data should be archived.
* Inter-operability: Different monitoring systems could obtain and share each other’s monitoring information to avoid the functionality overlapping.

### II.2 A Grid Monitoring Architecture Based on MDS

Grid monitoring infrastructure has a four-tiered structure: Sensors, Archive System, Information Providers and Grid Information Browser. Figure 1 shows how monitoring information travels through the four-tiered structure and reaches end users.

* Sensors probe the target systems and obtain related statistics.
* The data importer of the archive system fetches the statistics from sensors and stores them into the database.
* The Grid information provider retrieves information from the database, processes it according to application requirements and returns the results to Grid systems.
* The remote web server issues Grid commands to fetch monitoring information from the Grid information service.

#### II.2.1 Sensor

A sensor can measure the characteristics of a target system. It generates a time stamped performance statistics. A simple sensor example would typically execute one of the UNIX utilities, such as top, ps, ping, iperf, ndd, or read directly from system files, such as /proc/\* to extract sensor-specific measurements. Sensors are used to monitor CPU usage, memory usage and network traffic. Some sensors can monitor and capture abnormal system status. We define the type of measurement generated by a sensor, a “metric”. As shown in Figure 1, four types of computer systems are monitored: file service, high performance storage system (HPSS), network equipment and computing nodes. Each sensor relies on a set of standard APIs and protocols to publish the sensor data. The design of the API and protocol is beyond the scope of this paper.

#### II.2.2 Archive System

The Archival system is used to hold historical data that can be used for predication and analysis. There are two components in archival system: data importer and telemetry database. An importer fetches the monitoring data from sensors via standard API, and saves the received data into the telemetry database. The database consists mostly of telemetry gathered by different sensors of different metrics. Some databases might include derived parameters, statistics, and any other data elements required by the Grid application. A telemetry database can be any relational database, such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, it can even be a set of flat files. A telemetry database also acts as a server to answer all types of telemetry queries. Therefore it needs to support flexible, complicate query operations and powerful query language. SQL is a perfect candidate. But the SQL’s for different relational databases are different from each other, and they do not support interoperability. To hide the details of the underlying databases and provide the user a uniform SQL interface, we use ODBC 111http://www.odbc.org to wrap the telemetry databases. This implementation allows greater flexibility in the archiving system.

#### II.2.3 Information Provider

The information provider provides detailed, dynamic statistics about instrumentation to Grid monitoring service, MDS. It is managed and controlled by MDS. The information provider either invokes and stops a set of sensors to do active probing, or interacts with running sensors to obtain the current status of resource. An information provider can also query the database to get historical information. We implemented our customized information provider to fetch information from the telemetry database, process the information if necessary, and return the necessary information to the MDS which invokes the information provider.

#### II.2.4 Grid Information Browser

GridView222http://heppc1.uta.edu/atlas/gridview was developed at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) to monitor the U.S. ATLAS Grid. It was the first application software developed for the U.S. ATLAS Grid Testbed, released in March, 2001, as a demonstration of the Globus 1.1.3 toolkit. The original text version of GridView provides a snapshot of dynamic parameters like cpu load, up time, and idle time for all Testbed gatekeepers through a web page, updated periodically. MDS information from GRIS/GIIS servers is available through linked pages. In addition, a MySQL server is used to store archived monitoring information. This historical information is also presented through GridView. A java applet version of GridView is also available. This applet version presents a hierarchical display of grid services through a graphical map-centric view. As prototype grids become larger and offer more services it becomes desirable to have a quick and easy method for determining which sites have less than a complete set of operational services, along with detailed error messages for services that are failing. GridView fulfills this need by performing tests of the Globus Toolkit based services at grid computing resources and presenting the results via an applet that provides different views of the state of the testbed.

GridView is comprised of two different subsystems, a data collection daemon and a Java applet for visualization. The data collection process periodically contacts remote computing systems to ascertain the operational status of the three services offered by the Globus Toolkit. During the testing at the remote system, a transcript is maintained of the tests performed, the status of the tests and any generated error messages that indicate faulty services. Also saved during testing is the information provided by the Globus Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) for both Grid Information Index Services (GIIS) and Grid Resource Information Services (GRIS). At the completion of a testing cycle, the data collection daemon publishes this information to an HTTP server that provides the applet to users.

The visualization applet uses the information recorded by the data collection daemon and presents it in three differing views via an HTTP server. Figure 3 presents a geographical representation where top-level computing sites are shown on a map of the continental United States. A status icon for each site shows the combined status of all computers tested at the site. This view provides a quick snapshot of the overall status of the U.S. ATLAS computing testbed. A hierarchical view of the data shows users the status information for every test and test sequence along with the related transcripts associated with the tests. By following the color-coded status icons, users can quickly determine which tests failed at which sites. Clicking on a particular test or test sequence will automatically bring the associated test transcript into view, as shown Figure 4. Finally, the users can inspect the contents of the MDS services offered in the testbed, as shown in Figure 5. This is a graphical and hierarchical view of the data retrieved during testing. The main goal of this screen is to allow users to view static MDS entries as well as the exact values of dynamic entries that have violated the LDAP consistency tests. Figure 2 shows the status of USATLAS Grid testbed as viewed through the GridView text interface.

#### II.2.5 Desired Features of the System Architecture

The proposed architecture can separate the facility monitoring from the Grid environment. The changes in hardware and monitoring tools can be hidden from the Grid computing environment. When new hardware is added in the local facility, the local monitoring infrastructure can easily add the new hardware to the monitoring system. This monitoring system simplifies the design of new sensors: new sensors can be plugged into the monitoring architecture with minimum effort. The sensors do not need to know who wants to subscribe to this metric and the number of the subscribers. The subscribers (consumers) can also be simplified because they just need to tell information provider what metric they are interested in. It is up to the information provider to deliver the specified metrics to the subscribers. The MDS information provider provides a well-designed interface between the Grid and computing facilities. It can provide monitoring information for different Grid applications as long they use protocols provided by the MDS CFFK2001 . By distributing and replicating the telemetry databases and MDS servers in different locations, we can avoid the problems caused by a single centralized server.

* The MDS provides the cache copy of the lastest value from the MySQL database.
* Non-intrusiveness: Sensors and local monitoring tools put less than 1 Percent CPU Load on the entire system. The information provider can prevent users from directly accessing to the database server, protect the sensitive information in the database effectively.
* Scalability: 1100 linux nodes and the network connectivity of eight USATLAS testbeds are monitored by our system without adding too much load on the target systems.
* Flexibility: Independent of Sensors. Many sensors can be easily plugged in as long as they have a well defined protocol and API. Another advantage is that the archival system is independent to the underlying database.

## III Related Works

Ganglia: Ganglia ganglia  is a scalable distributed monitoring system designed for high performance computing systems such as large localized clusters and even widely distributed Grids. It relies on a multicast-based listen/announce protocol to monitor the state within clusters and uses point-to-point connections among representative cluster nodes to federate clusters into a Grid and aggregate their states. Ganglia has the advantages of low per-node overhead, high concurrency and robustness.

Ganglia has been deployed at BNL on the RHIC and Atlas clusters to successfully monitor over 1000 nodes, organized into 10 separate clusters based on experiment. One collection node has been setup to gather all of the data from these clusters and archive it locally to be displayed by ganglia’s web front end. The data is made available to each experiment for their own monitoring and job scheduling needs and is also published through Globus MDS.

Network Weather Service (NWS): The goal of the Network Weather Service is to provide accurate forecasts of dynamically changing performance characteristics from a distributed set of meta-computing resources. It can produce short-term performance forecast based on historical performance measurement. The Network Weather Service attempts to use both existing performance monitoring utilities and its own active sensors to make use of resource, probe its own usage and measure the performance. It can measure the fraction of CPU time available for new processes, TCP connection time, end-to-end TCP network latency, and end-to-end TCP network bandwidth. It has NWS sensors, CPU sensors, network sensors. It also has predictors that forecast the system performance. NWS was widely adopted by many Grid communities. Therefore, we will incorporate NWS in our Grid monitoring toolkits. We can pull out the sensor modules and prediction modules and put them into our monitor architecture. We also need to design an interface that can bridge the communication between the sensors and the telemetry database.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP): Since SNMP was developed in 1988, the Simple Network Management Protocol has become the standard for inter-network management. Because it is a simple solution, requiring little code to implement, we can easily build SNMP sensors for our monitoring architecture. SNMP is extensible, allowing us to easily add network management functions to the monitoring system. SNMP also separates the management architecture from the architecture of the hardware devices, which broadens the arena of our monitoring architecture. SNMP is widely available today and has extensive support from academic, commercial vendors and research institutes. Therefore, SNMP based tools are widely used for network monitoring and management. SNMP based tools and sensors should be evaluated for our Grid monitoring system.

Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS): MDS provides the Grid information in Globus gridbook  and OGSA OGSA . The MDS stores the information collected by its information providers in a cache. These information providers are run periodically to update the information about the hosts, networks, memory usage, disk storage and software available on the system and batch queue status. MDS is designed to monitor large number of entities and help users to discover and keep track of these resources. It supports a registration protocol which allows individual entities and their information providers to join and leave MDS dynamically. The monitoring infrastructure is organized hierarchically, built on top of the LDAP server (light weight directory access protocol ldap-1 ; ldap-2 ). MDS provides LDAP compatible client tools to access the MDS server. Due to its LDAP-based implementation, MDS is not designed to handle highly volatile monitoring data.

Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA): The Grid Monitoring Architecture consists of three components: directory service, producer and consumer. Producers publish their existence, description and type of performance data to the directory service. Consumers query the directory service and subscribe to the selected producer. The time-stamped performance data, called events, are directly sent from the producers to consumers based on subscription entries stored at the directory service. Grid Monitoring Architecture supports both a streaming publish/subscribe model, and query/response model. Compared with MDS, the GMA supports the highly dynamic monitoring data. The data stream continuously flows from producers to consumers until the subscription becomes invalid.

## IV Conclusion

Grid computing benefits from a scalable monitoring system. GridMonitor is a promising candidate for this role. It can be used to monitor several thousand computers, geographically distributed among several computing centers. It naturally integrates large scale fabrication monitoring into the grid system. The initial prototype was deployed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Open challenges include performance, availability of crucial system status information, robustness and scalability.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors wish to thank RHIC/USATLAS computing facility group for their valuable comments and discusses for this work. This work is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.


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# The galactic disk thickness and the mass of the spherical component

## CONCLUSIONS

The parameters of stellar disks and dark halo are found for the sample of eight edge-on spiral galaxies with the help of numerical N-body modeling. The bending instabilities are considered as a main factor increasing the disk thickness.

The relation between the stellar disk thickness and the relative mass of dark halo is shown for the galaxies studied. Since all but the one galaxies are bulgeless, the spherical component mass reveals the dark halo mass in our galaxies. The relation between the disk central surface density and its relative thickness $`z/h`$ is presented.

DB is supported by the NASA/JPL grant NRA 99-04-OSS-058. The project is partially supported by RFBR through the grant 01-02-17597 REFERENCES  Mikhailova E., Khoperskov A., Sharpak S., 2000, in conf. proc. ”Stellar Dynamics: from classic to modern” , ed. by Ossipkov & Nikiforov, p.147  Hunter C., Toomre A., 1969, ApJ, 155, 747  Polyachenko V., Shukhman I., 1979, AZh, 56, 724  Vandervoort P., 1991, ApJ, 377, 49  Bizyaev D, Kajsin S., 2003, AAS 201 146.05, astro-ph/0306190


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# A Software Data Transport Framework for Trigger Applications on Clusters

## I Background

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) ALICEWebNorm ; ALICEWebPhys ; ALICETP  is a heavy ion experiment that is being built for the future Large Hadron Collider (LHC) LHC  at CERN. It is designed primarily for operation in the collider’s heavy ion (HI) mode, but will also acquire data in proton-proton (pp) mode. Heavy ion mode is characterized by very large multiplicities of up to 15.000 particles per event, a resulting maximum event size of about 70 MB, and an allowed data rate into the last trigger stage, the High Level Trigger (HLT), of up to 25 GB/s, with the largest data contributor being the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). Event rates into the HLT are 200 Hz and 1 kHz for the TPC and other participating central detectors in HI and pp mode respectively. In the HLT the complete event data of the participating detectors is available, and its task is to perform a full event reconstruction with this data. As for other LHC experiments, the HLT’s architecture is a large farm consisting of the order of a thousand PC nodes running the Linux operating system and connected via a fast network. Readout data passes through the cluster in several steps of analysis and merging.

In the TPC, as an example, the reconstruction process starts with the raw ADC values that are read out from the detector via the fiber optical Detector Data Links (DDLs). Each link corresponds to one of 6 sub-sectors, called patches, of the TPC’s 36 sectors, called slices, and is terminated in a PCI card through which data from the detector is read out into the HLT system. During the readout process an FPGA on the PCI card can perform the first stage of an analysis together with programs on the node. For instance three dimensional space-points of the charge clusters can be determined directly by the FPGA using the ADC values. These event space-points are then placed into the node’s main memory where they are used for further analysis. On the same or other HLT nodes tracklets can be calculated from these space-points. For load-balancing purposes this task will be distributed among several cluster nodes. Once the tracklets have been determined they are sent to nodes in the next stage. Tracklets that belong to the same sector, and the same event, are sent to the same node in the next stage. On that node the tracklets are then merged across slice boundaries, to form tracklets for a whole sector. In the following steps, the tracklets from multiple sectors are sent to the next level of nodes, to be merged into larger groups. One sample sequence is to first merge groups of adjacent sector-sextetts and then merge the tracks from the resulting six sextetts.

These hierarchical stages of analysis map naturally onto the detector geometry and hierarchy, as the preceeding description shows. A second mapping is possible between this hierarchy and the topology used for the network connecting the HLT nodes. As a node in one specific stage has its main amount of communication with the nodes in the directly preceeding and following stages, it does not require full bandwidth to every node in the cluster. This in turn drastically reduces the requirement for the bisection bandwidth of the network in the cluster, and thus also its cost. To retain maximum flexibility in the network choice the software framework developed for the HLT encapsulates network functionality in a separate class library, described below in section II.3.

## II The Framework

### II.1 Overview

For the transport of the event data through the HLT cluster a software framework was needed with two main requirements set for it: Flexibility and efficiency. With regard to flexibility, the designed architecture is a number of independant components that communicate via a common interface. Using this interface it is possible to plug the components together in different configurations, as required by the current conditions, e.g. a test run or pp or heavy ion mode. Even a reconfiguration of the system at runtime, with the necessary reconnections of the components, should be supported by the interface.

Concerning efficiency, the primary requirement is a minimal CPU usage during the transfer of data, both between components on the same and on different nodes. Any CPU cycle used for data transport is unavailable for analysis, increasing the number of CPUs needed for the HLT, and as a result also its cost. As a secondary efficiency requirement, the transport of the data should be performed as quickly as possible to reduce the latency for an event. This latency reduction is not of prime importance as an increased latency can always be compensated by large enough buffer memory and memory prices are steadily decreasing with time.

C++ was chosen as the framework’s implementation language, to take advantage of object-oriented programming capabilities, such as encapsulation and inheritance. Java and other OO languages were not considered, as either their basically interpreted nature rendered them unsuitable for the set performance and efficiency requirements and/or because of their less widespread support and usage.

### II.2 The Framework Interface

For efficiency reasons, the component communication interface as such works only locally on a node. To avoid unnecessary copying steps between the components, shared memory is used for the exchange of data. Descriptors of the data, holding the shared memory ID and the offset and size of the data block, are transmitted from a data producer to a consumer. The publisher-subscriber paradigm, also known as producer-consumer-principle, is used for the interface, so that multiple consumers can attach to one producer. Each subscriber uses a separate set of named pipes for communication with the publisher but all access the same data blocks in shared memory. The descriptors sent from a publisher to its subscribers are thus identical for each subscriber. A descriptor can hold multiple data blocks of the same event and in addition to the blocks’ locations also contains their datatypes as well as an indicator of a block data’s origin

One implication of this approach of using one data block in shared memory for processing by multiple subscribers, is that the buffer management has to be done in the publisher. This further implies, that each subscriber has to inform its publisher when it has finished processing an event so that the publisher can safely reuse the shared memory block for another event.

### II.3 Network Communication in the Framework

As explained above, the interface for communication between the framework components is purely local on one node. Therefor network communication between components on different nodes has to be handled in a different way. Two specialized components have been written, described below in section II.5.1, that work as bridges between nodes. For the network communication these two components make use of a class library that provides two abstract network communication APIs, one for small message-like sends and one for large data block transfers. By splitting communication into these two APIs each of them can be optimized for the corresponding task. Both interfaces are defined, each in its own abstract base class, so that derived implementation classes for a specific network technology and protocol can make use of low overhead, low latency, or high speed features present in that technology. As the call interface is only defined in an abstract base class it is possible to provide several derived classes with implementations for each of the two communication types, with each implementation supporting a different network technology and/or protocol. In the current version of the library, classes for both communication types are provided for TCP/IP, as the most widely available baseline network protocol, and SCI network cards by Dolphin DolphinSCI  using the SISCI API SISCI , as an example of a System-Area-Network (SAN). Fig. 1 shows the relation of the different communication classes in the library.

### II.4 Framework Fault Tolerance

One major aspect of any system based on large scale PC clusters, must be the tolerance of the system as a whole with respect to the failure of hardware or software components on a node, or even of a whole node. By using the dynamic reconnection feature of the component communication interface, as well as a number of specialized components, the framework is able to support configurations that can handle these faults. A number of components are contained in the framework that allow to setup configurations that handle faults by distributing workload among a number of nodes. If a component related to one of these nodes fails, the whole node is deactivated and the load distributed among the remaining nodes. When a stand-by node is available it can be activated to take over the processing tasks of the deactivated node. A more sophisticated system of only temporarily routing a data flow around a fault, restarting and reconnecting failed components and then again activating the original data flow, is not yet available for the framework, but can be implemented using external programs.

### II.5 Framework Components

Actual functionality of the framework is provided by its components, separate programs that can be connected together using the interface described in section II.2. A number of fully functional components that allow to setup the data flow in a cluster are part of the framework. These components, described in section II.5.1, can be used without change in setups utilizing the framework. Further components are provided as templates that can be used to add user specific functionality to a framework system. Three templates are present, for data sources, data processing components, and data sinks, covered in section II.5.2. Adding the appropriate functionality to these templates allows to create a framework configuration that is able to address specific requirements for a local system. The final group of components presented in section II.5.3 addresses the fault tolerance (FT) abilities described in section II.4. A number of these components are extended versions of the basic data flow components, adding special fault tolerance handling capabilities, while others are custom components with specific FT functionality.

#### II.5.1 Data Flow Components

The first data flow component, the EventMerger shown in Fig. 2, merges multiple data streams, containing subevents belonging to the same event, into one data stream with larger subevent parts or even whole events. For this purpose it waits to receive one subevent from each of its configured input streams. Once these subevents are received, it constructs a new event descriptor, containing all data blocks from the received subevents and publishes it for its attached subscribers.

Working in conjunction, the EventScatterer and EventMerger components, shown in Fig. 3, provide a mechanism to split a single stream of events into multiple smaller event streams, that are later recombined again into one single stream. This stream splitting can be used for load balancing purposes, with the resulting multiple streams being distributed among a number of nodes for processing, to be later re-combined. Splitting up is done on an event-by-event basis, with each single event being dispatched to one output stream as a whole. No event is split up into multiple sub-events for distribution.

Another group of components, the SubscriberBridgeHead and PublisherBridgeHead shown in Fig. 4, provide a mechanism of transparently connecting components on different nodes, as mentioned in section II.3. The SubscriberBridgeHead component contains a subscriber class to accept events using the common communication mechanism for network transmission to the PublisherBridgeHead on another node. After receiving the event data and the necessary descriptor field subset the PublisherBridgeHead again makes the data available to other components on its node using an instance of the standard publisher class. In this way a transparent component connection is enabled across nodes. Components connected to the PublisherBridgeHead will behave as if they had been subscribed directly to the data’s original publishing component. Network communication between the two bridge head components is performed using the network class library presented in section II.3, making the bridges independant of a specific networking technology. To use them with a specific networking technology or protocol only an appropriate implementation of the library classes is required. No change to the bridge components themselves is necessary.

#### II.5.2 Component Templates

User specific tasks related to framework components can basically be grouped into three different categories: data sources, processing components, and data sinks. Data sources are components that obtain data from a source outside of the framework, examples of this are special readout devices like PCI cards with links to detectors. The data source component template already contains the code for the shared memory buffer management and for the publishing of events. To use the component, only the specific code to access the data source concerned (so that event data is placed in the shared memory buffers) has to be added. If the buffer management code does not meet the requirements of the data source it can also be easily replaced.

Processing components are located in the middle of an analysis chain. They accept new data from data producers, perform analysis steps with the data, mostly producing some new output data, and make the new output data available to other data consumers. In the analysis template functionalities for accepting new input data via the framework interface, dereferencing that data in shared memory for access, shared memory output buffer management, and the publishing of newly created output data are already provided. The processing function for the data is called from this gluecode after dereferencing the input data and has just to be implemented as needed in order to create a fully functional data processing component.

Data sinks are components at the end of a processing chain, accepting data that is then forwarded to a destination outside of the framework, e.g. simply written to disk or tape, passed to a DAQ system, or sent to a mass storage system. In the provided sink template the code to accept input data from publisher components and dereference and access that data is already provided. The data output part that has to be implemented is called after the data has been made accessible inside the component.

#### II.5.3 Fault Tolerance Components

To handle the tolerance with regard to component faults as described in section II.4 three new components have been introduced into the framework and four of the data flow components described in section II.5.1 have been enhanced with FT capabilities. Modified versions of both bridge components have been enhanced with the abilities to accept commands from external controlling instances. Primary commands for the bridges include connect and disconnect commands, as well as the specification of the remote bridge components address, which together allow to dynamically establish bridge connections between nodes.

The other two enhanced components are the event scatterer and gatherer components, that have also been modified to accept commands from supervising programs. Here the primary commands for both components are the disabling and enabling of output or input event stream paths. When an ouput path is disabled in the scatterer, the events that have been sent to that path and not received back as finished, are distributed again among the remaining paths. Events that arrive after a path has been disabled are also dispatched only to one of the remaining streams. In the gatherer component disabling a path causes events that have been received through that path and that are released by its subscribers, to not be released directly, but only to be stored as released. As the events for the failed path will be sent on another path by the scatterer, they will be received by one of the other input paths in the gatherer. As soon as this happens, the event release is immediately sent to the publisher at the path from which the event was re-received. For events that are still being processed downstream of the gatherer, just the new received input path is stored instead of the original disabled one. Together these components ensure that each event that arrives at the scatterer’s input passes the gatherer’s output exactly once, as long as there is at least one active event stream connecting them.

Of the custom built components the first is a simple fault detector component that acts as a monitoring subscriber. It is attached to a publisher and if no events have been received from that publisher for a specified time it reports this associated publisher as defective to the second specialized component, the fault tolerance supervisor. This supervisor component then sends commands to specified targets, informing them of a disabled event path. Targets for this command are FT scatterer and gatherer components, as well as the bridge manager, the third custom FT component. In the bridge manager, lists are kept of nodes and their bridge components, associated with the active event streams as well as spare stream nodes. When a stream is deactivated the bridge manager looks for an available spare node and if one is found disconnects the bridges connected to the deactivated stream. The addresses of the spare nodes are then sent to the bridges, followed by connection commands. As soon as the bridges report their respective connections to be established, commands are sent to the scatterer and gatherer involved, re-activating the path that had failed. After the first events arrive in the fault detection subscriber the status of the path is changed back to operational in the supervisor component.

## III Tests and Benchmarks

### III.1 ALICE TPC Slice Test

To test the functionality and performance of the framework an analysis test has been performed on a cluster in Heidelberg. In this test one slice of simulated proton-proton events of the ALICE TPC,with 25 events piled-up, has been processed. Processing has started with the compressed ADC values, similar to the read-out data format, and has been executed up to merged tracks for the whole slice. The hardware used for the test was a mix of 19 dual SMP Linux PCs, with CPU speeds of 733 MHz and 800 MHz and 512 MB of RAM per node. For the network connection between the nodes Fast Ethernet was sufficient due the comparatively small size of the pp events used, between 5 kB and 20 kB packed ADC data per patch. SuSE Linux 7.2 with a 2.4.18 kernel was used as the nodes’ operating system.

As shown in the test’s software configuration in Fig. 5 the nodes are arranged in four hierarchy levels (HL), HL0 to HL3. On the six nodes making up the first level the simulated data is read from files and published as the start of the processing chain. On each node subevents of the same patch in the slice are used for publishing. The two processing steps performed on the HL0 nodes are the unpacking of the runlength encoded data for processing and the cluster-finding on the unpacked raw data. Both of these, as well as all following analysis stages, are implemented in a separate analysis component so that each processing step could theoretically be executed on a separate node. Data of found clusters on one node is then shipped, via an event scatterer and three bridge component pairs, to three nodes in the next hierarchy level.

Of the nine nodes in HL1 three are shared between each pair of adjacent patch nodes in HL0. Cluster data from each HL0 node is distributed among its three assigned HL1 nodes for track finding. This is done in a way that on each HL1 node one tracking component runs for each of its two associated patches, to use the nodes two CPUs. The reason for the even distribution of events among the three nodes, in contrast to e.g. using one node fully for each patch and sharing only one node between a pair of patches, lies in the better load balancing upon node failures. If one of the HL1 nodes fails only one third of the processing capability of the concerned patches is lost compared to up to two thirds for one patch in the other case. After tracking, the six patches’ tracklets for an event are sent to one of the three nodes in HL2 where track merging on the slice level is performed. As the last step, the merged slice tracks from the three HL2 nodes are sent to a single event stream merger node in HL3, collecting all processed events without any additional analysis. The processing components used in the test are the ones that have already been used for the test in PARA02Paper .

In this test a sustained event processing rate of more than 420 Hz has been achieved. The limiting factor was the CPU utilization on the HL0 nodes that was at 100 % for both CPUs. By splitting up the ADC unpacking and cluster finding on separate nodes this bottleneck could be avoided, with the problem in this case, that the unpacked ADC data constitutes the largest data volume of the different types of data (e.g. packed ADC, unpacked ADC, clusters, or tracklets) in the processing. Another approach could be to use a scatterer and a bridge after the file publishing to send a portion of each patch’s packed ADC data for processing to a second HL0 node. With the result shown, it has been demonstrated that the framework can be used already today, e.g. in test beams, and should be ready for both pp and heavy ion mode with their required event rates of 1 kHz and 200 Hz respectively, given enough processors to perform the required data analysis.

### III.2 Fault Tolerance Test

As a demonstration of the fault tolerance capabilities contained in the framework a small test was performed with a setup of seven nodes similar to the one shown in Fig. 6. One scattering node sends data, evenly distributed, to three processing nodes that again send their data to a fourth node, gathering the data. A fifth node is available as a stand-by processing node. The remaining seventh node is used to run the two control programs, the fault tolerance supervisor and the bridge manager.

In the test, the configuration was activated to send 128 kB events at approximately 100 Hz frequency. After a short time of running the network cable of one of the three processing nodes was unplugged with the results shown in Fig. 7. The figure shows the network transfers measured during the test on five nodes, the scatterer and gatherer nodes, one working processing node, the processing node whose network cable was unplugged, and the spare working node. All graphs are scaled independantly and arbitrarily for visualization purposes, as the absolute measured values are not relevant for this test.

At point 1 in the graph the network cable has been unplugged. The throughput on the worker node involved goes to zero and on the sending node the throughput drops to about two thirds of its original value, as expected. Several seconds later, at point 2, the fault detector has triggered and has informed the tolerance supervisor of the node’s “fault”. The commands to disable the concerned path between scatterer and gatherer have been sent to those two components. As a result of this action, the throughput on the sender increases to its previous value. On the remaining worker shown traffic increases by about one-half its previous value, again as expected when the previous workload of three nodes is distributed among two remaining ones. Finally at point 3, the bridge manager has replaced the “faulty” node with the spare one and reactivated the respective path. Network traffic on the spare node is now at the previous value of the removed node and on the remaining worker the traffic also decreases to its previous value. At that point the operation of the system has been fully restored to its state prior to the simulated fault. The time elapsed between unplugging and this restoration is primarily determined by the timeout values chosen for the test, e.g. in the fault detection subscriber.

With this test it has been shown that the fault tolerance implementation in the framework works and that faults can be handled by the system already now, although only with a granularity of complete nodes.

### III.3 Framework Interface Performance

As a benchmark for the performance and scaling behaviour of the interface used for communication between the framework’s components, a test has been run on three separate dual SMP PCs, with CPU speeds of 733 MHz, 800 MHz, and 933 MHz. In the test a publisher announces a continuous stream of $`50\times 10^6`$ empty events to a subscriber and the subscriber immediately releases each received event. Since the events are empty, no event data is used or copied in the test, restricting the test to measure the interface’s performance.

The results that have been obtained from this test are given in Table 1 and Fig. 8. In the table, the achieved average event rates over the test’s running time are shown together with the corresponding time overhead. Fig. 8 shows two different scaling behaviours, with and without a cut, obtained during the benchmark together with the clock speed scaling as a point of reference. Application of the cut was performed in order to use the timing obtained from the fastest 90 % of events only. The motivation for this is that programs get descheduled during the test by the operating system. Since the timing is measured by reading the current system time at the beginning and end of multiple involved function blocks, a descheduling in such a block will increase the measured time incorrectly. As these descheduling events do not cause a fixed time increment the cut was made to exclude the 10 % of events that took the longest time to process in each of the function blocks and thereby remove the influences of descheduling events on the interface performance measurements. In the table the cut is not included so that these numbers indicate the absolute rate that can be achieved in an actual system. As can be seen from the table and the figure, the interface scales reasonably well with the clock frequency. It does not scale perfectly but the framework should be able to take advantage of a good fraction of future increases in CPU clock frequency making it appropriate for use on CPUs expected for the time when the ALICE HLT starts to operate. Recent tests with a number of performance enhancements in the interface code have indicated that, for future versions, a performance increase of about a factor of four can be expected.

## IV Conclusion and Outlook

We have presented a working framework for constructing distributed online data analysis chains running on Linux clusters. The framework allows a flexible configuration due to its approach of components that can be connected together via a defined common interface. Using a separate class library to encapsulate network communication makes the framework and its components independant of the actual network technology and protocol used, allowing for more flexibility in the construction of a cluster. With the described tests the framework has been shown to work and to be usable in real applications already today, provided that enough CPU power is available to perform the desired analysis which is independant of the framework as such. Future work on the framework has to include a simple method to specify the configuration to be used in a cluster as well as an efficient method of starting and supervising the involved processes on the cluster nodes. This supervision, in principle a detector control system, also involves a central or distributed fault tolerance control and decision unit that should allow for a finer grained control of the fault tolerance and recovery actions. Finally, more tuning measures on the framework, at least completing the above mentioned preliminary performance enhancements, will be done as well.

###### Acknowledgements.

Work on the ALICE High Level Trigger has been financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of its program “Förderschwerpunkt Hadronen- und Kernphysik - Großgeräte der physikalischen Grundlagenforschung”.


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# Absence of Suppression in Particle Production at Large Transverse Momentum in √𝑠_{𝑁𝑁} = 200 GeV d+Au Collisions

PHENIX Collaboration

## Abstract

Transverse momentum spectra of charged hadrons with $`p_T<8`$ GeV/$`c`$ and neutral pions with $`p_T<10`$ GeV/$`c`$ have been measured at midrapidity by the PHENIX experiment at RHIC in d+Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}`$ = 200 GeV. The measured yields are compared to those in p+p collisions at the same $`\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}`$ scaled up by the number of underlying nucleon-nucleon collisions in d+Au. The yield ratio does not show the suppression observed in central Au+Au collisions at RHIC. Instead, there is a small enhancement in the yield of high momentum particles.

High transverse momentum ($`p_T>`$ 2 GeV/$`c`$) hadrons provide an excellent probe of the high energy density matter created in relativistic heavy ion collisions jet-quenching ; baier . They arise from fragmentation of quarks and gluons (partons) scattered with large momentum transfer, $`Q^2`$, in the initial parton-parton interactions owens . In the absence of medium effects, these hard scattering yields in nucleus-nucleus collisions should scale with the average number of inelastic nucleon-nucleon collisions $`N_{coll}`$ (binary scaling). One of the most intriguing observations from experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is the large suppression of high $`p_T`$ neutral pion and charged hadron yields in central Au+Au collisions with respect to p+p results scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisionsAdcox:2001jp ; Adcox:2002pe ; Adler:2002xw ; ppg014 .

Theoretical studies of parton propagation in high density matter suggest that partons lose a significant fraction of their energy through gluon bremsstrahlung jet-quenching ; baier , reducing the parton momentum and depleting the yield of high $`p_T`$ hadrons quench-effect ; vitev ; ina ; levai ; xnwang ; arleo . This is a final-state effect in the spatially extended medium created in A+A collisions. Initial state effects include nuclear modifications to the parton momentum distributions (structure functions), and soft scatterings of the incoming parton prior to its hard scattering. These should be present in p+A, d+A and A+A. Interpretations of Au+Au collisions based on initial-state parton saturation effects dima  or final-state hadronic interactions gallmeister  also predict a considerable suppression of the hadron production at high $`p_T`$. It is therefore of paramount interest to determine experimentally the modification, if any, of high $`p_T`$ hadron yields due to initial state nuclear effects for a system in which a hot, dense medium is not produced in the final state. This Letter reports on charged hadron and $`\pi ^0`$ production at midrapidity obtained by the PHENIX nim\_phenix  experiment at RHIC in d+Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}`$ = 200 GeV. The results are compared to those in p+p and Au+Au ppg014 ; ppg024 ; ppg023  at the same nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy. Similar d+Au measurements are also reported in STARdAu ; PHOBOSdAu .

The data were collected under two different trigger conditions. Minimum bias events with vertex position along the beam axis within $`|z|<`$ 30 cm were triggered by the Beam-Beam Counters (BBC) nim\_phenix  which cover $`|\eta |`$ = 3.0-3.9. The minimum bias trigger accepts (88 $`\pm `$ 4%) of all inelastic d+Au collisions that satisfy the vertex condition. A total of 1.2 $`\times `$ 107 and 1.7 $`\times `$ 107 events were analyzed for charged hadron and $`\pi ^0`$ spectra, respectively. A second “photon triggered” sample, requiring showers above 2.5 GeV for lead-scintillator (PbSc) and 3.5 GeV for lead-glass (PbGl) Electromagnetic Calorimeters (EMCal) nim\_phenix  in addition to the BBC requirement, is used to extend the $`\pi ^0`$ measurements to higher $`p_T`$. This trigger sampled a total of 1.7 $`\times `$ 109 events.

Neutral pions were measured by the PHENIX EMCal via the $`\pi ^0\gamma \gamma `$ decay. The EMCal covers $`|\eta |0.35`$ in pseudorapidity and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi =\pi `$ in azimuth. It consists of 6 PbSc and 2 PbGl sectors, each covering $`\pi /8`$ in azimuth. The data from PbSc and PbGl were analyzed separately. The energy calibration is obtained from beam tests, cosmic rays, minimum ionizing energy peaks of charged hadrons, and the energy/momentum ratio of electrons identified with the Ring Imaging $`\stackrel{ˇ}{\mathrm{C}}`$erenkov Detector (RICH). The combined uncertainty on the energy scale and linearity is $``$1.5%, determined from the response to identified electrons, and confirmed by the positions and widths of the observed $`\pi ^0`$ mass peaks.

Photon-like energy clusters in the calorimeter are selected via shower profile cuts. The invariant mass for all photon pairs with energy asymmetry $`|E_1E_2|/(E_1+E_2)<0.7`$ is calculated and binned in $`p_T`$. The $`\pi ^0`$ yield in each $`p_T`$ bin is determined by integrating the background subtracted two-photon invariant mass distribution ppg014 ; the background is determined from mixed events. The peak-to-background ratio increases from $`0.3`$ at $`p_T`$=1.25 GeV/$`c`$ to more than 5 above 4.25 GeV/$`c`$. The raw $`\pi ^0`$ spectra are corrected by Monte Carlo simulations for trigger efficiency, acceptance, and for $`\pi ^0`$ reconstruction efficiency including dead areas, effects of energy resolution, photon identification cuts and peak extraction window. Finally, the yields are corrected to the center of the $`p_T`$ bin using the observed slope of the spectrum. Below $`p_T`$= 5 GeV/$`c`$ the yields are determined from the minimum bias data sample while above 5 GeV/$`c`$ the photon triggered sample is used. The main sources of systematic errors are listed in Table I. The final systematic errors on the spectra are 10 to 16%, increasing with $`p_T`$.

Charged particles are reconstructed using a drift chamber (DC) followed by two layers of multiwire proportional chambers with pad readout (PC1, PC3) nim\_phenix . In this analysis tracks were reconstructed over a restricted pseudorapidity range $`|\eta |<0.18`$. Pattern recognition in the DC is based on a combinatorial Hough transform in the track bend plane, while the polar angle is determined by PC1 and the location of the collision vertex along the beam direction mitchell . The vertex was constrained to be within $`|z|<`$18 cm for analysis of the charged tracks. The track reconstruction efficiency is approximately 98%, independent of $`p_T`$. Particle momenta are measured with a resolution $`\delta p/p=0.7\%1.1\%p`$ (GeV/$`c`$). The momentum scale is known to 0.7%, from the reconstructed proton mass using the time-of-flight. A confirmation hit is required in PC3, located at a radius of 5 m, within a 2.5$`\sigma `$ matching window to eliminate most albedo, conversions, and decays. The remaining background above $`p_T`$=5 GeV/$`c`$ is subtracted statistically using identified conversions and weak decays (primarily kaons) ppg023 .

Corrections to the charged particle spectrum for geometrical acceptance, decays in flight, reconstruction efficiency, and momentum resolution are determined using a single-particle GEANT Monte Carlo simulation. All analysis steps, including the outer detector matching cuts are applied consistently in simulation and data. As the DC and PC occupancies in d+Au are low, no multiplicity-dependent occupancy corrections are required. The yield was corrected to the center of the $`p_T`$ bin. Table II lists the source and magnitude of each contribution to the systematic uncertainties on the charged particle spectra.

The fully corrected $`p_T`$ distributions of $`\pi ^0`$’s and $`(h^++h^{})/2`$ are shown in Fig. 1. Each panel shows the reference spectrum from p+p collisions along with the particle spectrum from d+Au. The reference for $`\pi ^0`$ is the $`\pi ^0`$ spectrum measured in p+p by PHENIX ppg024 , shown on the right panel. For charged hadrons, the reference is obtained by scaling up the $`\pi ^0`$ spectrum by the $`p_T`$-dependent h/$`\pi `$ ratio observed at the ISR alper  at $`\sqrt{s}=23`$ to 63 GeV and measured by PHENIX. The value of h/$`\pi `$ is constant at 1.6 $`\pm `$ 0.16 above 1.5 GeV/$`c`$, and decreases at lower $`p_T`$ to a value of $`1.25_{0.25}^{+0.12}`$. Table III summarizes uncertainties on the reference spectra.

A standard way to quantify nuclear medium effects on high $`p_T`$ production is by the nuclear modification factor, which we define for d+Au collisions as the ratio of invariant yield in d+Au to that of p+p, scaled by the number of binary collisions.

$$R_{\mathrm{dA}}(p_T)=\frac{(1/N_{\mathrm{dA}}^{evt})d^2N_{\mathrm{dA}}/d\eta dp_T}{N_{coll}/\sigma _{\mathrm{pp}}^{inel}d^2\sigma _{\mathrm{pp}}/d\eta dp_T},$$

where $`N_{coll}`$ is the average number of inelastic nucleon-nucleon (NN) collisions per event in the minimum bias collisions, and $`N_{coll}/\sigma _{\mathrm{pp}}^{inel}`$ is the nuclear overlap function $`T_A(b)`$. Using a Glauber model mult  and simulation of the BBC, $`N_{coll}`$ is 8.5 $`\pm `$ 0.4 in minimum bias d+Au.

The ratio $`R_{\mathrm{dA}}`$ is plotted separately for $`\pi ^0`$ measured in the PbGl and in the PbSc calorimeters in Fig. 2. The two analyses are consistent within errors. The data are compared to the corresponding nuclear modification factor $`R_{\mathrm{AA}}`$ obtained from central Au+Au collisions. The top panel of Fig. 3 shows $`R_{\mathrm{dA}}`$ for inclusive charged particles $`(h^++h^{})/2`$, again compared with $`R_{\mathrm{AA}}`$ observed in central Au+Au collisions, while the lower panel compares $`(h^++h^{})/2`$ with $`\pi ^0`$. In both Figs. 2 and 3, the uncertainties are plotted as follows: error bars represent the quadrature sum of statistical errors and those systematic errors which vary point-to-point in $`p_T`$; systematic errors on the absolute yield and the systematic errors which are correlated point-to-point are shown as bands. All procedures for estimating the various systematic errors have been adjusted to provide estimates corresponding to 1$`\sigma `$ error values.

The data clearly indicate that there is no suppression of high $`p_T`$ particles in d+Au collisions. We do, however, observe an enhancement in inclusive charged particle production at $`p_T>`$ 2 GeV/$`c`$. A similar enhancement was observed in p+A fixed-target experiments cronin  and is generally referred to as the “Cronin effect”. To facilitate comparison of the Cronin effect in inclusive charged particles and $`\pi ^0`$, the lower part of Fig. 3 shows all systematic uncertainties common to both analyses in the bar on the left. It should be noted that this uncertainty must be added in quadrature with the bands shown for each curve to obtain the 1$`\sigma `$ allowed range of $`R_{\mathrm{dA}}`$ from the data. The $`\pi ^0`$ data suggest a smaller enhancement for pions than for inclusive charged particles at $`p_T`$ = 2-4 GeV/$`c`$. We note that the charged spectrum includes baryons and antibaryons, which may have a different nuclear enhancement than the mesons cronin .

The various models of the suppression observed in Au+Au predict a different dependence on $`N_{coll}`$ in d+Au dima ; vitev2 ; boris . Therefore, a second data sample was selected by requiring observation of a neutron in the Zero-Degree Calorimeter on the deuteron-going side of PHENIX. This, together with the requirement of particles entering both Beam-Beam Counters, selects a class of events in which only the proton from the deuteron interacts with the Au nucleus. The mean number of binary collisions for this sample is calculated with the Glauber model to be 3.6 $`\pm `$ 0.3. Particle yields in this sample have a $`<`$ 5% uncertainty beyond that of the minimum bias sample, arising from trigger bias.

Fig. 4 shows the ratios of $`R_{\mathrm{dA}}`$ in minimum bias d+Au to $`R_{\mathrm{pA}}`$ in the neutron tagged sample, for both $`(h^++h^{})/2`$ and $`\pi ^0`$. Systematic uncertainties on the spectra cancel in the ratio; the band around unity shows the uncertainty on the ratio of the number of binary collisions in the two samples. Average values of $`N_{coll}`$ are 3.6 per participating proton in the neutron tagged sample and 8.5 for 1.7 participating nucleons from the deuteron in minimum bias d+Au. Given the systematic uncertainties on $`N_{coll}`$, we cannot exclude a small centrality dependence for $`p_T>1`$ GeV/$`c`$. It should be noted that the figure also indicates that d+Au collisions provide a good measure of the physics of p+Au.

The observation of an enhancement of high-$`p_T`$ hadron production in both the minimum bias d+Au and the neutron tagged sample of p+Au collisions indicates that the suppression in central Au+Au collisions is not an initial state effect. Nor does it arise from modification of parton structure functions in nuclei. The data suggest, instead, that the suppression of high $`p_T`$ hadrons in Au+Au is more likely a final state effect of the produced dense medium.

We thank the staff of the Collider-Accelerator and Physics Departments at BNL for their vital contributions. We acknowledge support from the Department of Energy and NSF (U.S.A.), MEXT and JSPS (Japan), CNPq and FAPESP (Brazil), NSFC (China), IN2P3/CNRS and CEA (France), BMBF, DAAD, and AvH (Germany), OTKA (Hungary), DAE and DST (India), ISF (Israel), KRF and CHEP (Korea), RMIST, RAS, and RMAE (Russia), VR and KAW (Sweden), U.S. CRDF for the FSU, US-Hungarian NSF-OTKA-MTA, and US-Israel BSF.