HEPSYSMAN May 2007 Oxford & SouthGrid Computing Status (Ian McArthur), Pete Gronbech May 2007 Physics IT Services PP Computing

Physics IT (windows services) Vista Deployment: We intend to deploy Vista after Service Pack 1 is released. Most Desktop Systems will need to be upgraded to take advantage of the new features. ( More RAM / Graphics Card Replacement ). Office 2007 Deployment: Office 2007 will be deployed as soon as time allows. Internet Explorer 7: We are delaying the release of IE 7 to managed desktops until we receive confirmation from the OSRIS ( Financial ) support team that IE7 is supported. The deployment may be brought forward if the number of 0-day vulnerabilities increase though. Spysweeper: Spysweeper has now been removed from Managed desktops and laptops. We are now relying on Sophos exclusively for Anti-Virus and Malware detection and removal. If you find that you PC is running slowly then please NT Support so that we can investigate why. Diskserver Replacement: The user areas on PPFS2 will be moved within the next few months to new disk storage. Disk quotas will be increased.

Campus Common Desktop We have been evaluating the use of Altiris to allow deployment of virtual applications. This simplifies rollout and updating of software by rolling the applications whole environment into a single package which can be downloaded and run by any user. We may be able to share the generation of packages with the Common Desktop support staff.

Anti-Spam Sep 06 Now Incoming SPAM rate has increased slightly but quarantine release rate has fallen a little. Very few released s actually turn out to be useful s.

SharePoint An installation of MS SharePoint Services is being evaluated, in particular by the EURECA project (Hans Kraus) Web browser-based team-working software Provides workspace for: Schedules Documents Discussions Wikis, blogs, etc. Can be administered by members of research group Available to users outside Physics

Computer Rooms - Begbroke Department has signed up to share the new computer room at Begbroke Science Park with the Oxford Supercomputer. We will get 22 out of the 55 rack spaces and can generate up to 250KW of heat. This will provide sufficient space for the PP tier-2 centre, new large clusters for Astro and Theory plus a number of smaller clusters (AOPP and Clarendon) The Computer room is housed in the Institute of Advanced Technologies (AIT) which will be opened by Alistair Darling MP on 15 th May. Work on the computer room starts immediately afterwards and should be complete by mid-August. There will be a couple of weeks of acceptance testing before handover and installation during September. Currently working through the detailed design with the chosen main contractor before finalising plans and costs by early May.

New Begbroke Computer Room The New Computer room being built at Begbroke Science Park jointly for the Oxford Super Computer and the Physics department, will provide space for 55 (11KW) computer racks. 22 of which will be for Physics. Up to a third of these can be used for the Tier 2 centre.

Computer Room – Local Infrastructure Even with space at Begbroke, we need space to hold our infrastructure and development machines. Existing computer rooms are poorly equipped with both power and air-conditioning and often take up valuable office space. We are therefore building a new computer room on level 1 of DWB. It will hold up to 20 racks generating up to 100KW of heat. (There maybe an option to install more air conditioning if needed). This is a small fraction of the load that would have been generated for a shared physics/OSC room in the basement (700KW+). Room should be ready by June and in the short term can house some equipment destined for Begbroke (e.g. the PP tier-2).

Local DWB Computer room Local Physics department Infrastructure computer room (100KW) has been agreed. This will relieve local computer rooms and possibly house T2 equipment until the Begbroke room is ready. Racks that are currently in unsuitable locations can be re housed.

Particle Physics Computing Staff Changes –Ewan MacMahon – New Unix System Administrator for PP –Sigal Cohen - New DAQ software developer PP linux Desktops –Ewan will be evaluating SL4, and possibly other distributions for suitability as a desktop Linux –It is essential that it is easy to maintain, and update in a secure way PP Cluster –New Server purchased for Linux file serving (pplxfs2) –Data was migrated in Dec 06 –New infrastructure/installation/monitoring server –Userdisk upgraded to RAID array of 6 146GB disks (April 07) Local Grid Resources. Tier-2 Cluster –No new purchases due to lack of computer room / Electrical Power

PP Cluster The new server (dual-core, dual socket AMD Athlon 285 with 8GB ram) to replace pplxgen called pplxgenng is running Scientific Linux 4. We are planning to migrate all the servers to SL4 but need to wait for CERN etc. Users can test their applications on this machine now. Cluster load during April 07 by group 31 CPUs for general interactive work, development, testing and small scale batch runs. Group% of load Lhcb25.5 Sno24.7 Atlas16.26 Harp12.39 Lc12.17 Licas3.51 Zeus3.4 Minos1.29 PP cluster load Q1 07

PP Tier-2 Currently 40 dual processors. Expansion delayed due to shortage of computer room facilities. Have plans and funding to purchase ~50 dual-core, dual socket servers (comparable to 200 CPUs). Oxford supports 20 VOs. 17 of which have run jobs in the last year. Most active VOs are LHCb (38.5%), Atlas (21.3%) and Biomed (21%). 300,000 kSI2k hours delivered in the last 12 months. CMS, Atlas and LHCb have been the heavy users during April The graph on the right shows usage for the last year

Status at Cambridge Currently glite 3 on SL3 CPUs: GHz Xeon 3 TB Storage –DPM enabled Oct 05 Upgrade arrived Christmas Intel ‘ Woodcrest’ based servers, giving 128 cpu cores equiv. to approx 358 KSI2k. Local computer room upgraded. Storage upgrade to 40-60TB expected this summer. Condor version is being used but the latest LCG updates have a dependency for condor This development release should not be used in a production environment. LCG/glite should not be requiring this release.

Cambridge (2) CAMONT VO supported at Cambridge, Oxford and Birmingham. Job submission by Karl Harrison and David Sinclair LHCb on Windows project (Ying Ying Li) –Code ported to windows HEP 4 node cluster MS Research Lab 4 node cluster (Windows compute cluster) –Code running on a server at Oxford, possibly expansion on OERC windows cluster –Possible Bristol nodes soon

Other Southgrid sites RAL PPD, Birmingham and Bristol own talks Other groups within the Southgrid EGEE area are; EFDA-JET with 40 cpus up and running The Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET) Centre, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading started setting up their cluster in Dec 06.

Steve Lloyd Tests

Site Monitoring Grid wide provided monitoring –GSTAT –SAM –GOC Accounting –Steve Lloyds Atlas test page Local Site Monitoring –ganglia –pakiti –torque/maui monitoring CLIs –Investigating MonAMI Developing –Nagios; RAL PPD have developed many plugins, Other SouthGrid sites are just setting up

Summary SouthGrid continues to run well, and its resources are set to expand throughout this year. Birmingham new University Cluster will be ready in the Summer. Bristol small cluster is stable, new University cluster is starting to come on line. Cambridge cluster upgraded as part of the CamGrid SRIF3 bid. Oxford will be able to expand resources this Summer when the new computer room is built. RAL PPD has expanded last year and this year, way above what was originally promised in the MoU.

Funding Source Spen d (£k) Servers (Dual) Storage (TB) SpecInt2k (k) GridPP MoU (SpecInt2k) (k) 2001CDF-JIF1 (8X)12.4Morpheus 2002CDF-JIF Matrix 2002PPARC15520ppcluster 2004PPARC305.5ppcluster 2004Foster~ T2 Cluster 2005PPARC ppcluster 2006PPARC ppcluster 2007Foster T2 Cluster 2007Foster T2 Cluster * 2008GridPP34315 ?0 ?200 ??T2 Cluster 2009GridPP34010 ?25 ?300 ???T2 Cluster 2010GridPP33515 ?0 ?400 ???T2 Cluster 2011GridPP33015 ?0 ?500 ?????T2 Cluster * Approx level of Tier-2 MoU to April 2007 Upgrade plans for Oxford PP Clusters