HEPiX/HEPNT report Helge Meinhard, Alberto Pace, Denise Heagerty / CERN-IT Computing Seminar 05 November 2003

HEPiX/HEPNT Autumn 2003 (1) Held 20 – 24 October at TRIUMF, Vancouver Format: Mon – Wed Site reports, HEPiX and HEPNT talks Thu: Large Cluster SIG on security issues Fri am: Parallel sessions on storage, security and Windows issues Excellent organisation by Corrie Kost / TRIUMF Weather not too tempting to skip sessions Full details:

HEPiX/HEPNT Autumn 2003 (2) 76 participants, of which 11 from CERN Barring, Durand, Heagerty, Iven, Kleinwort, Lopienski, Meinhard, Neilson, Pace, Silverman, D Smith 59 talks, of which 19 from CERN Vendor presence (Ibrix, Panasas, RedHat, Microsoft) Friday pm: WestGrid Next meetings: Spring: May 24 th to 28 th in Edinburgh Autumn: BNL expressing interest

Highlights Unix-related (me) Windows-related (Alberto Pace) Security-related (Denise Heagerty)

Site reports: Hardware (1) Major investments: Xeons, Solaris, IBM SP, Athlon MP Disappointing experience with HT Increasing interest: Blades (e.g. WestGrid – 14 blades with 2 x Xeon 3.06 GHz each in 7U chassis) AMD Opteron US sites require cluster mgmt software with HW acquisitions

Site reports: Hardware (2) Physical limits becoming ever more important Floor space UPS Cooling power Weight capacity per unit of floor space Disk storage Some reports of bad experience with IDE-based file servers No clear tendency

Site reports: Software (1) RedHat 6.x diminishing, but still in production use at many sites Solaris 9 being rolled out Multiple compilers needed on Linux (IN2P3: 6), but not considered a big problem SLAC looking at Solarix/x86 AFS not considered a problem at all SLAC organising a ‘best practices’ workshop (complementing LISA and USENIX workshops) – see f)

Site reports: Software (2) NFS in use at large scale Kerberos 5: No clear preference for MIT vs. Heimdal vs. Microsoft; lots of home bricolage around to have them synchronise Reports about migrating out of Remedy DESY and GSI happy with SuSE and Debian (except for laptops) Condor getting more popular, considered as LSF replacement; Sun GridEngine mentioned as well

CERN talks Castor evolution (Durand) Fabric mgmt tools (Kleinwort) CVS status and tools (Lopienski) Solaris service update (Lopienski) Console management (Meinhard) ADC tests and benchmarks (Iven) New HEPiX scripts (Iven) LCG deployment status and issues (Neilson) LCG scalability issues (D Smith) Windows and/or security related

RedHat support (1) Tue: Talk by Don Langley/RedHat Described new model, and technical features of RHEL 3 released the day after RHEL releases every 12…18 months, with guaranteed support for 5 years Yearly subscriptions (per machine) grant access to sources, binaries, updates, and to support (different levels) Said that RedHat would be able to find the right model for HEP Reactions: Not everyone was convinced, no clear commitment to react to our needs, not the right level

RedHat support (2) Wed: Interactive discussion Labs currently using RH wish to stay and go for RHEL; HEP-wide agreement preferred High level of HEP-internal Linux support must be taken into account by RH HEP- or site-wide licences much preferred over per- node SLAC, FNAL and CERN contact RedHat in common in order to negotiate for HEP Other HEP sites should be able to join if they so wish

Other highlights (1) PDSF Host Database project (Shane Canon) Inventory mgmt, purchase information, technical details, connectivity, … Similar objectives to some combination of BIS/CDB, HMS, LanDB, … Unix and AFS backup at FNAL (Jack Schmidt) Investigated TSM, Veritas, Amanda, some smaller vendors Decided to go for TiBS (True incremental Backup System - Carnegie-Mellon offspring) – 1.6 TB in 5 hours Large disk cache of backup data on server

Other highlights (2) Mosix and PBS clustering at TRIUMF (Steve Mcdonald) Challenge: provide interactive and batch services with little budget 7 dual-proc systems, three running OpenMosix all the time (one of them serving as a head node), rest running OpenPBS if jobs, migrating to Mosix if no jobs

Mass storage workshop A meta-meeting… Discussed what and how to discuss Joining in by VRVS: FNAL, RAL, IN2P3, DESY, FZK, … Launched forum for MSS and their interoperability list: Each site to report (to Don Petravick/FNAL) about capabilities and needs conerning WAN interfaces, security, monitoring and protocols, file transfer protocols, mgmt protocols, replica system Next meeting: VRVS conference in December Next HEPiX: LCSIG will be on storage

My personal comments Excellent means of building relationships of trust between centres No impression of cheating by anybody Clear concrete steps towards sharing tools… LAL using CERN printer wizard CERN using SLAC console software A lot of interest in ELFms … and even when not sharing implementations, sharing ideas and information is very beneficial