Global Access to High Energy Physics Software with Parrot and CVMFS

Scientists searching for the Higgs boson have profited from Parrot’s new support for the CernVM Filesystem (CVMFS) , a network filesystem tailored to providing world-wide access to software installations. By using Parrot , CVMFS, and additional components integrated by the Any Data, Anytime, Anywhere project, physicists working in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment have been able to create a uniform computing environment across the Open Science Grid . Instead of maintaining large software installations at each participating institution, Parrot is used to provide access to a single highly-available CVMFS installation of the software from which files are downloaded as needed and aggressively cached for efficiency. A pilot project at the University of Wisconsin has demonstrated the feasibility of this approach by exporting excess compute jobs to run in the Open Science Grid, opportunistically harnessing 370,000 CPU-hours across 15 sites with seamless access to 400 gigabytes of software in the Wisconsin CVMFS repository.

• Dan Bradley, University of Wisconsin and the Open Science Grid </i>