1. Farming Andrea Chierici CNAF Review 2015

2. Current situation

3. Computing resources 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici3 160K HS-06 Very stable, just a few hardware failures on older nodes We had to reboot the whole farm twice since december (2 critical kernel upgrades + glibc) – Smooth procedure, no service interruption

4. CPU tender 2014 tender still not installed (30K HS-06) – Procedure completed in October 2014, contract signed in march 2015 (?!) – Will be installed shortly – 2014 pledged resources still guaranteed 2015 tender targeted on blade solutions (Lenovo best bidder) – Machines should be available during summer We will be able to dismiss very old computing nodes and hopefully improve our PUE 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici4

5. Software Renewed LSF contract for whole INFN with Platform/IBM for next 4 years Virtualization infrastructure migrated to the “ovirt” software platform. – We can delegate machine management to single users or groups (e.g. user support) – Interface the infrastructure with other software tools (e.g. foreman) 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici5

6. Driving the migration of the provisioning software used by the whole CNAF puppet and foreman adopted in place of quattor (phasing-out this year) – Long process, required re-writing of many templates – New hardware infrastructure to be installed – Already able to install, configure and maintain WNs and UIs (2014 and 2015 tenders will be installed with puppet) Provisioning 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici6

7. Multicore support INFN-T1 fully supports Multi CORE and HIMEM jobs Dynamic partitioning activated on August the 1° Enabled on a subset of farm racks (up to 45K HS06) Production quality, tunable Currently Used by Atlas and CMS Accounting data properly delivered to Apel Solution implemented “in-house”, exportable – CERN interested, evaluating it 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici7

8. New activities and strategies

9. Testing low power solutions We started to investigate some promising low power solutions developed by hardware manufacturers. All solutions tested adopt the Intel Atom processor, based on x86 architecture – Transparent to users – If experiments code uses recent instructions performances may decrease significantly Result is encouraging – TCO lower compared to standard solutions (after 3 years), no tender prices 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici9

10. Our testing units HP Moonshot with m350 cards – 4 motherboards on each blade, no storage Supermicro Microserver – Form factor does not fit our requirements Contact with hardware vendors in order to test latest solutions in-house – HP probed our WNs in order to determine the best storage solution Providing us a new moonshot with 10 m350 cards and external iSCSI storage – Supermicro microblade Each blade carries 4 motherboards and 4 discs, less compact but with built-in storage 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici10

11. Avoton performance 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici11

12. Changing batch system LSF very robust and reliable (but expensive!) Lately HTCondor gained LHC community attention – Proved to scale better than Slurm – Interesting features (i.e. adding nodes without reconfiguring) Within 3 years we plan to change to HTCondor – Several internal software, mainly for accounting, to deal with – Implies a partitioning of the farm during the transition 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici12

13. Clouds Dynamic partitioning of the farm – a subset of the WNs can be dynamically detached from LSF and assigned to a Cloud Controller pilot service to provide interactive access requested by some experiments ready soon – Extending the computing resources using external data centers Interest in Indigo, focus on WP4 04/05/2015CNAF Review 2015, Andrea Chierici13