Employees of the Laboratory of Information Technologies at JINR have developed and registered a software complex for creating digital twins (DTs) of distributed data acquisition, storage, and processing centres (DDPCs). The uniqueness of this program is that DTs created with its help effectively monitor the operation of DDPCs in terms of data flows and related tasks. According to developers, it is supposed to use the created software mainly for design and operation of computing infrastructures of physical experiments.

Architecture of developed software complex

A digital twin of a DDPC is a virtual copy of the data centre that shows how it works under any possible scenario. The software complex for creating DTs developed at MLIT has no analogues yet. “Currently, there are programs in the world to create digital twins, but they all reflect a data processing centre (DPS) in terms of engineering infrastructure – how electricity works, how airflow moves, and so on,” Daria Priakhina, a researcher at MLIT JINR, explains. “We have developed a software complex capable of creating twins that reproduce the processes of acquiring, collecting, transferring, storing, and processing data. Such twins are especially useful in the construction, operation, and improvement of computing architectures of various kinds of experimental facilities, for example, the NICA Complex at our Institute, since such facilities are collecting and will collect huge amounts of data that need to be promptly stored and processed. It will allow scientists to make great discoveries.”

One of the authors of the developed software complex – Daria Priakhina

The main component of the software complex is an algorithm that implements simulation of distributed centres, taking into account the characteristics of data flows and tasks for storage and processing, as well as possible changes in the processes occurring in DDPCs. The program also implements processes of obtaining information about data processing centres (architecture, equipment parameters, characteristics of data flows and tasks, events occurring in the DDPCs, system scaling scenarios), structuring and storing the results obtained by digital twins. A possibility of graphical construction of the DDPC’s infrastructure, launching a data centre, and visualising the results of its work has been developed for a user.

Creation of infrastructure of data acquisition, storage, and processing centres

A group of developers consisting of three people – Vladimir Korenkov, Daria Priakhina, and Vladimir Trofimov – registered their software complex for creating digital twins of distributed data acquisition, storage, and processing centres in the Register of Russian Software on 14 August 2023.