AWSAC: Amazon Web Services for ATLAS Computing

High Performance Computing for the Large Hadron Collider in the cloud

In 2008/2009 I worked on this project in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, München. We used (infrastructre-as-a-service-) Cloud-Computing provided by Amazon Web Services to perform high performance scientific computing for the ATLAS experiment at LHC, CERN in Geneva.

The project was started in order to determine the possibilities for ATLAS Computing in the «Elastic Computing Cloud» (EC2) and is motivated by the advantages cloud computing has over classical grid computing.

In the course of this project, I developed a job submission and monitoring system for generic computing jobs in EC2 (schematically depicted below). Please find the project’s main website at gehrcke.de/awsac.