1. INFN Site Report R.Gomezel November 5-9,2007 The Genome Sequencing Center @Washington University St. Louis

2. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 2 Outline of Presentation Distributed File system Mailing Windows Update Security Tier-2: update Storage Wireless authentication

3. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 3 Cluster File system GPFS has been more and more used as shared disk and parallel file system for computing farm It shows high performance and scalability The new release 3.2 seems to scale better with the needs of our applications and to provide an improved NFS file serving capability if you need it An interesting new feature is the capacity of defining external storage pools in order to expand the storage pool data on a tape library So you can manage data on disks and tapes using GPFS according with different policies and in a transparent way to users and applications Some INFN sites are looking at it as a possible solution There are tests foreseen with the support of IBM in order to test this feature as soon as possible

4. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 4 Mailing Resources and mailboxes managed autonomously in every site: Average per site: 2 dual processors with 2GB RAM each devoted to mail service ~480 mailboxes Most of sites use linux as operating system and postfix for mail server All sites have been adopting antivirus and anti-spamming tools on mail server and declared they are satisfied with them puremessage and spamassassin Webmail mostly used: Horde and Squirrel The INFN mailing group is collecting information and evaluating the feasibility of implementing a centrally managed service to provide mailboxes to entire INFN community Disadvantages: loss of autonomous choice in managing mail service in each site Advantages: avoiding people managing mail service in every INFN site No needs to replicate for every site hardware and software devoted to mail service

5. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 5 Windows VISTA @ INFN ( by Gian Piero Siroli) CAMPUS: right to use Business, Enterprise and Ultimate (different distribution and key management) XP considered the production platform Vista on hold A few test installations in various INFN Units INFN Windows Group Suggestion not to install Vista before first SP KMS test infrastructure / WAN foreseen in the near future to support all INFN Sections Delays because of KMS key reconfiguration to allow for additional activations Considering “MAK only” scheme

6. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel INFN Security Group Tasks ( by R.Cecchini ) “Optimal” lan configuration and monitoring to minimize intrusion risks and damages Standard configuration for some strategical services to be distributed (and maintained) as virtual machines X.509 certificates on token usb Auditing of the security of lans and procedures

7. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Status of LHC Tier2 federations (by M. Morandin) Two new sites have been included recently (Sep. '07) among the ones INFN is committed to support: Milano (Atlas) and Pisa (CMS)‏ the addition of the two centers significantly increase the available resources, especially for CMS here's how the INFN federations are composed now: Alice: Catania and Torino Atlas: Milano, Napoli and Roma CMS: Legnaro (LNL), Pisa and Roma LHC-b: CNAF (Bologna)

8. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Upgrading the computing rooms upgrades of the electrical and cooling systems have proceeded as foreseen although in a few cases there have been some delays capacity needed for 2008 operation, in terms of available rack space and associated services, will be achieved soon but in most cases, not reaching yet the expected full scale design values modular approach allows for further expansion of the UPS and cooling capacity to be preformed in the future as needed in all the Tier2 sites the electrical and cooling systems have been designed to handle high power density (15-20 kW/rack)‏

9. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Getting ready for the start of LHC commissioning of the centers is on-going at all sites the contribution of the INFN federations to the activities of the LHC experiments has been so far satisfactory common solution for storage has been adopted throughout the federations (dCache for CMS, DPM for Atlas,...)‏ by January '08 decisions on the basic storage and network technologies to be adopted in view of the first LHC runs should also be taken (i.e.: NAS vs. SAN)‏ problems with the INFN Tier1 Castor system has represented a serious limitations for some of the Tier2 commissioning activities

10. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel The 2008 upgrade up to now, due to tough budget constraints, the growth of computing resources, at the Tier2 sites, has been rather slow except in those cases where leverage of external resourses has been possible in 2008, substantial increase of the computing resources is expected to happen, taking advantage of the latest available products and lowest possible prices the INFN federations should then be ready to successfully accomplish their important tasks during the first period of LHC operation

11. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 11 Storage Update SAN-based infrastructure is still the preferred solution to make storage system available to computing units After tests, iSCSI technology is not yet offering the performance you would like to have Test activity showed that implementation of bonding on hosts running linux kernel seems to suffer from degraded performance reading data from storage server using TCP protocol 10Gb interface to have more than a couple of Gb bandwidth

12. HEPiX Fall 2007 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 12 TRIP: Wireless authentication now in production TRIP is a wireless authentication infrastructure presented last fall meeting it provides a common service allowing INFN users to get access to wireless network in INFN sites without the need to ask for site-specific authentication Now it is in production and it allows roaming users to get authentication throughout INFN Now the issue is trying to set up a monitoring tool to find out the cause of the problem when eventually authentication fails This could become a time-consuming activity for system managers