Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A RAL Tier1/A Report HepSysMan - July 2004 Martin Bly / Andrew Sansum

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Overview Hardware Network Experiences / Challenges Management issues

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Tier1 in GRIDPP2 ( ) The Tier-1 Centre will provide GRIDPP2 with a large computing resource of a scale and quality that can be categorised as an LCG Regional Computing Centre January 2004 – GRIDPP2 confirm RAL to be host for Tier1 Service –GRIDPP2 to commence September 2004 Tier1 Hardware budget: –£2.3M over 3 years Staff –Increase from 12.1 to 16.5 by September

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Current Tier1 Hardware CPU –350 dual Processor Intel – PIII and Xeon servers mainly rack mounts –About 400KSI2K –RedHat 7.3 –P2/450 tower units decommissioned April 04 –RH72 and Solaris batch services to be phased out this year Disk Service – mainly “standard” configuration –Dual Processor Server –Dual channel SCSI interconnect –External IDE/SCSI RAID arrays (Accusys and Infortrend) –ATA drives (mainly Maxtor) –About 80TB disk –Cheap and (fairly) cheerful Tape Service –STK Powderhorn 9310 silo with B drives

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July New Hardware 256 x dual Xeon –2GB RAM (32 with 4GB RAM), 120GB HDD, 1Gb NIC: 8 racks. 20 disk servers with two 4TB IDE/SCSI arrays: 5 racks –Infortrend EonStore A16U-G1A units, each with 16 x WD 250GB SATA HDD – 4TB/array raw capacity –Servers: dual Xeon 2GB RAM, dual 120GB SATA system disks, dual 1Gb/s NIC –160Tb raw, ~140TB available (RAID5) Delivered June 15 th, now running commissioning tests

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July 20046

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Next Procurement Need in production by January 2005 –Original schedule of December delivery seems late –Will have to start very soon –Less chance for testing / new technology Exact proportions not agreed, but … –400 KSI2K ( CPUs) –160TB disk –120TB tape?? –Network infrastructure? –Core servers (H/A??) –RedHat? Long range plan needs reviewing – also need long range experiment requirements so as to plan environment updates.

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July CPU Capacity

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Tier1 Disk Capacity (TB)

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July High Impact Systems Looking at replacement hardware for high impact systems: –/home/csf, /rutherford file systems –Mysql servers –AFS cell –Front end / UI hosts –Data movers –NIS master, Mail server Replacing mix of Solaris, Tru64 Unix and AIX servers with Linux – consolidation of expertise Migrate AFS to OpenAFS and then K5.

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Network Firewall Site Router Production SubnetTest Subnet Superjanet Servers Workers Test network (eg MBNG) Server Servers WorkersProductionVLAN TestVLAN SiteRoutableNetwork Rest of Site

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Network Firewall Site Router Tier1 Network SuperJanet Servers Workers Test network (eg MBNG) Server Servers Workers TestVLAN ProductionVLAN Rest of Site

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July UKlight Connection to RAL in September Funded to end 2005 after which probably merges with SuperJanet 5 2.5Gb/s now  10Gb/s from 2006 Effectively dedicated light path to CERN Probably not for Tier1 production but suitable for LCG Data challenges etc, building experience for SuperJanet upgrade. UKLight -> Starlight

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Forthcoming Challenges Simplify service – less “duplication” Improve storage management Deploy new Fabric Management RedHat Enterprise 3 upgrade Network upgrade/reconfigure???? Another procurement/install Meet challenge of LCG – professionalism LCG Data Challenges …

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Clean up Spaghetti Diagram How to phase out “Classic” service.. Simplify Interfaces: Less GRIDS “More is not always better”

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Storage: Plus and Minus ATA and SATA drives External RAID arrays SCSI interconnect Ext2 file system Linux O/S NFS/Xrootd/http/gridftp/bbftp/srb/…. NO SAN No management layer NO HSM 2.5% failure per annum - OK Good architecture, choose well Surprisingly unreliable: change OK – but need journal: XFS? Move to Enterprise 3 Must have SRM Need SAN (Fibre or iSCSI …) Need virtualisation/DCACHE.. ????

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Benchmarking Work by George Prassas on various systems including a 3ware/SATA RAID5 system. Tuning gains extra performance on RH variants Performance of RHEL3 NFS servers and disk I/O not special despite tuning, c/w RH73 Considering buying SPEC suite to benchmark everything.

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Fabric Management Currently run: –Kickstart – cascading config files, implementing PXE –SURE exception monitoring –Automate – automatic interventions Running out of steam with old systems … –“Only” 800 systems – but many, many flavours –Evaluating Quator – no obvious alternatives – probably deploy –Less convinced by Lemon – bit early – running Nagios in parallel

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Yum / Yumit Kickstart scripts now use Yum to bootstrap systems to latest updates Post-install config now uses Yum wherever possible for local additions Yumit: –Nodes use Yum to check their status very night and report to central database –Web interface to show farm status –Easy to see which nodes need updating. Machine ownership tagging, port monitoring project

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Futures Storage Architectures –iSCSI, Fibre, dCache –Need to be more sophisticated to allow reallocation of available space CPUs –Xeon, Opteron, Itanium, Intel 64bit x86 architecture Network –Higher speed interconnect, iSCSI

Martin Bly RAL Tier1/A 1/2 July Conclusions After several years of relative stability must start re- engineering many Tier1 components. Must start to rationalise – support limited set of interfaces, operating systems, testbeds … simplify so we can do less better LCG becoming a big driver –Service commitments –Increase resilience and availability –Data challenges and move to steady state Major reality check in 2007!