WLCG Google Earth Dashboard User's Guide

This application provides a nice visualization of the WLCG grid activity. It shows graphically information covering data movement for both montecarlo production and tier0 export, and additional information about running jobs on the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE (jobs only) grids.

Apart from the Google Earth client there is no need for any additional software installation, all the required information is contained in an XML file provided as a URL.

You see green, yellow and red colours for the transfer links. The status of the transfer link is defined by the number of successful transfers divided by all transfer attempts (success + failures). Experiments define the threshold for the transfer quality whether they consider it normal (green), warning state (yellow) or critical (red). The circles in which the sites are shown are also shown with different colours. Blue circle means that there is no job processing activity, fraction of green and red is defined by the number of successful and failed jobs processed by the site during the last 24 hours. The size of the circle is defined by the number of running jobs at the site at the current moment. Finally, blue and pink links show job submissions and return of the output when the job is accomplished. Since there is a limit on the size of the input file which can be replayed by the Google Earth client, we can not show all events happening over the last 10 minutes, we have decided to give a priority to job submissions rather than showing the return of the result back to the submission point (you see more blue links than pink ones). The blue link connects the point from where the user submits the job with the site where the job is processed. Why most of the blue lines start at CERN? Because CERN hosts most of production and analysis servers of the experiments and the submission rate from CERN is much higher than from other sites.

Tip

You could also use WLCG Google Earth Dashboard straight from your browser without even installing the Google Earth client; the Google Earth browser plug-in currectly works only on Windows and Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (Intel and PowerPC) but support for Linux is on its way according to Google. http://dashb-earth.cern.ch for the four main LHC experiments. http://dashb-earth.cern.ch/?vo=alice for only the ALICE experiment. http://dashb-earth.cern.ch/?vo=atlas for only the ATLAS experiment. http://dashb-earth.cern.ch/?vo=cms for only the CMS experiment. http://dashb-earth.cern.ch/?vo=lhcb for only the LHCb experiment.

If you prefer installing the native Google Earth client locally on your machine, please follow the instructions on the next page (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows are supported).