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M.G. Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies (LIT) of Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), in cooperation with Samara National Research University, has launched at Samara University a grid site for distributed processing of physical data from the SPD experiment at NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility).
According to Artem Petrosyan, Senior Researcher at LIT, Deputy Coordinator for Computing and Software for the SPD experiment, Samara University has been a member of the SPD collaboration since 2021, and will now become an active participant in the processing and storage of the SPD experiment data.
Samara University had all the necessary engineering infrastructure for organizing the computing cluster. Based on these data, the JINR LIT team of specialists, which, besides Artem Petrosyan, includes Danila Oleinik, Senior Researcher at LIT, Coordinator for Computing and Software for the SPD experiment, and Andrey Kiryanov, Deputy Coordinator for Computing and Software for the SPD experiment, a representative of B.P. Konstantinov St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics (PNPI) (RC “Kurchatov Institute”), prepared all the necessary documentation and launched the process of implementing the computing cluster, together with their colleagues from Samara University.
Later, in 2024 and 2025, Samara University purchased the required computing equipment, which LIT staff helped connect and configure. In this work, Samara University was represented by Vladimir Saleev, Chief Researcher, Head of the Department of General and Theoretical Physics, and Aleksander Baskakov, Junior Researcher, Head of the Telecommunications Centre. Now the grid website of Samara University has already been fully commissioned and has become part of the SPD experiment data processing system implemented by the Laboratory on the base of the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex.
“This example of successful cooperation between JINR and Samara University clearly showed that JINR LIT has the expertise of developing a roadmap for creating a computing cluster for any organization. This means that we are capable to actually deploy a grid cluster from scratch and implement it together with a scientific organization that has never been part of distributed computing systems before and has no experience in this area”, emphasized Artem Petrosyan. According to the scientist, this opens up broad prospects for other participants in the SPD collaboration to apply this experience and, in the future, scale the distributed computing system of the experiment.
The grid site at Samara University is a cluster of 300 computing nodes. The grid cluster of another member in the SPD collaboration, PNPI (RC KI), is of the same volume. It should be recalled that in December 2024, the first mass Monte Carlo simulation using a distributed data processing system was conducted on the base of MICC (Multifunctional information and computing complex) JINR and the facilities of PNPI. This resulted in over 200 million events. The storage of backup copies of the data received, which occupied over 500 terabytes, was also organized on the distributed resources of JINR and PNPI.
“Cooperating with PNPI on organizing the computing cluster has provided LIT with extensive experience and excellent opportunities for selecting and developing the necessary infrastructure and software solutions. The created developments were not only transferred to the organizations cooperating with us, but also became a solution for a number of computing tasks of JINR LIT”, said Artem Petrosyan.
The LIT specialists accompanied deploying computing cluster at Samara University at all stages and continues cooperating with their colleagues from Samara. At present, Samara University is purchasing equipment for organizing, in cooperation with LIT, a so-called federated data storage providing a single virtual storage volume for data coming from various sources in heterogeneous storage systems. In future, specialists from LIT are planning to deploy a grid cluster for SPD at St. Petersburg State University, as well.
“Due to launching grid sites in three scientific organizations – JINR, PNPI and Samara University, the SPD experiment was the first in the NICA megascience project, which had implemented an almost fully functional prototype of the truly distributed experimental data processing and storage system combining geographically remote computing centres”, commented Sergey Shmatov, Director of JINR LIT.
“The cooperation of physicists from Samara University and JINR has been intensively developing in the scientific and educational fields in recent years”, noted Vladimir Saleev, Head of the Department of General and Theoretical Physics at Samara University. “This includes participating of the University teaching staff and postgraduates in conferences and schools for young scientists to be held by JINR; internships for students of the Faculty of Physics under the START program; defending by the University staff their candidate dissertations in the fields, such as “Theoretical Physics” and “Physics of Atomic Nucleus and Elementary Particles” in JINR Dissertation Councils; working in the framework of joint projects of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Science Foundation. A new stage of the cooperation began in 2021, when Samara University, represented by the scientific team of the Department of General and Theoretical Physics, became one of the members in the international SPD NICA collaboration. The work in the SPD NICA collaboration provides the opportunity for scientists of the Faculty of Physics to participate on a long-term basis in the world-class project, involve students and postgraduates in interesting scientific work both in theoretical physics and computer modeling, as well as in modern information technologies. We associate the further development of the cooperation between the University and JINR, in particular, with the possible opening of the JINR Information Centre at Samara University. This will allow the University to create the structure for integrating fundamental research in the region not only in the field of high-energy and elementary-particle physics, but also in other promising areas of quantum physics, such as quantum computing and quantum mechanical design of new materials”.
The information on the SPD experiment:
The SPD (Spin Physics Detector) experiment at the NICA collider is aimed at researching spin parameters of elementary particles. The experiment will solve problems of studying the structure of protons and deuterons: the nature and the structure of their own angular momentum – spin. Beams of polarized protons and deuterons will collide in the collider. These studies will cover previously unexplored energy areas between those that can be provided by the ANKE installations of the COZY accelerator (Germany) and the SATURN accelerator (France), as well as the RHIC collider (USA) and the future polarized physics program at the LHC (CERN) and EIC (USA).
