Widmer, E.D., Viry, G., Carminati, F. Galli-Carminati, G. (2012). Do regions matter in Alice? Social relationships and data exchanges in the Grid. The European Physical Journal Plus. N°127, pp. 20-27.
This study aims at investigating the impact of regional affiliations of centres on the organisation of collaborations within the Distributed Computing ALICE infrastructure, based on social networks methods.
A self-administered questionnaire was sent to all centre managers about support, email interactions
and wished collaborations in the infrastructure. Several additional measures, stemming from technical observations were collected, such as bandwidth, data transfers and Internet Round Trip Time (RTT) were
also included. Information for 50 centres were considered (about 70% response rate). Empirical analysis
shows that despite the centralisation on CERN, the network is highly organised by regions. The results
are discussed in the light of policy and efficiency issues.
|  |
