The LHCb Experience on the Grid from the DIRAC Accounting Data

DIRAC is the software framework developed by LHCb to manage all its computing operations on the Grid. Since 2003 it has been used for large scale Monte Carlo simulation productions and for user analysis of these data. Since the end of 2009, with the start-up of LHC, DIRAC also takes care of the distribution, reconstruction, selection and analysis of the physics data taken by the detector apparatus. During 2009, DIRAC executed almost 5 million jobs for LHCb. In order to execute this workload slightly over 6 million of pilot jobs were submitted, out of which approximately one third were aborted by the Grid infrastructure. In 2010, thanks to their improved efficiency, DIRAC pilots are able, on average, to match and execute between 2 and 3 LHCb jobs during their lifetime, largely reducing the load on the Grid infrastructure.

Given the large amount of submitted jobs and used resources, it becomes essential to store detailed information about their execution to track the behaviour of the system. The DIRAC Accounting system takes care, among other things, to collect and store data concerning the execution of jobs and pilots, making it available to everyone via the public interface of the LHCb DIRAC web portal in the form of time-binned accumulated distributions. The analysis of the raw accounting data stored allow us to improve and debug the system performance, as well as, to give a detailed picture on how LHCb uses its Grid resources. A new tool has been developed to extract the raw records from the DIRAC Accounting database and to transform them into ROOT files for subsequent study. This contribution presents an analysis of such data both for LHCb jobs and the corresponding pilots, including resource usage, number of pilots per job, job efficiency and other relevant variables that will help to further improving the LHCb Grid experience.