1. UK Status and Plans Scientific Computing Forum 27th Oct 2017
Prof. David Britton GridPP Project leader
University of Glasgow
David Britton, University of Glasgow
IET, Oct 09

2. Outline Current GridPP Sites and supported science
UK Funding Agency structure and Computing Strategy
UKT0 Initiative
Future evolution of Funding Agency
Future evolution of GridPP sites
David Britton, University of Glasgow
SCF

3. GridPP Status
~10% of WLCG; 18 sites hosting hardware. Tier-1 at RAL and 4 distributed Tier-2 centres.
Network Connectivity
RAL Tier-1:
Gb/s active/active LHCOPN connection.
2 x 40Gb/s active/standby UK Core network.
Tier-2s:
Typically Gb/s dedicated link to UK core network
Currently no need for LHCONE (additional expense? + complexity?)
ScotGrid
NorthGrid
SouthGrid
London
David Britton, University of Glasgow
SCF

4. Janet Core Network
David Britton, University of Glasgow
SCF

5. VO Usage (Normalised CPU Time)
April 2017 to September 2017
LHC: 93%
Policy: 10% of CPU and 5% of storage available to “non-LHC VOs”
David Britton, University of Glasgow
SCF

6. Funding agency (STFC) structure
STFC has five Directorates
Finance
Strategy, Performance,
Comms
Business &
Innovation
National Facilities Directorate
Programmes Directorate
Runs National Facilities:
Diamond Light Source
ISIS (neutrons)
Central Laser Facility .
Supports programmes in:
HEP,
Astronomy,
Astro-Particle, Nuclear

7. Major computing within/supported by STFC
STFC has five Directorates
Finance
Strategy, Performance,
Comms
Business &
Innovation
National Facilities Directorate
Programmes Directorate
STFC has five
Scientific
Computing
Department (SCD)
Computing for
Theory and Cosmology
Computing for
National Facilities
Computing for
LHC (+other HEP)
SCD is internal to STFC, GridPP & DiRAC are external (funded at Universities) except that the Tier-1 is run within SCD. Up until now these have been separate computing “facilities” (but with very good informal co-operation).

8. STFC computing Strategic Review
“All STFC programme areas anticipate an order of magnitude increase over the next five years in data volumes, with implications for requirements for computing hardware, storage and network bandwidth. Meeting this challenge is essential to ensure the UK can continue to produce world leading science, but in the current financial climate it is clear there will be funding limitations. Long-term planning will be critical, as will more efficient use of resources.
The scientific disciplines supported by STFC should work more closely together to find ways of sharing computing
infrastructure, with new projects encouraged to make use of existing expertise and infrastructure. “
In the future we expect funding to only be available for joined up computing
...but to be clear .....we wanted to do this anyway.....
In particular, we need to work closely with SKA, EUCLID, aLIGO…

9. UKT0 – a community initiative
UKT0 is an initiative to bring STFC computing interests together.
It was formed from bottom up by the science communities - long before the Strategic Review.
Aims are harmonisation, sharing, cost-effectiveness, avoiding duplication…
It is not a project seeking to find users - it is users wanting to work together
Co-operation across disciplines now embedded.
Joint GridPP posts with SKA, LSST, LZ.
Joint working meetings.
DiRAC - sharing RAL tape store ✔
Astronomy jobs run on GridPP ✔
Lux-Zeplin in production ✔
Recent aLIGO expansion to use RAL ✔
Culham LAb. ✔

10. Examples of important UK Astronomy and Particle-Astro computing interests
LSST
Data Access Centre
Data Challenge2 in 2018
Advanced LIGO
Run-3 with increased sensitivity in 2018
Lux-Zeplin
Mock Data Challenge1 in 2017
MDC2 in 2018
EUCLID
Galaxy shear simulations in 2018
SKA : HQ in Manchester
Responsible for Science data Processor (P.Alexander)
Developing European Science Regional Centre (SRC)
Cambridge, Manchester & STFC involvement in AENEAS (H2020)
WLCG-SKA meetings, CERN-SKA accord,
CERN-SKA “Big Data” workshop Alan Turing Institute.

11. UKT0 – a community initiative
STFC has five Directorates
Finance
Strategy, Performance,
Comms
Business &
Innovation
National Facilities Directorate
Programmes Directorate
STFC has five
Scientific
Computing
Department (SCD)
Computing for
Theory and Cosmology
Computing for
National Facilities
Computing for
LHC (+other HEP)
+ computing for Astronomy, Particle-Astro, Nuclear
UKT0

12. Change of funding agency structure in UK
Following a national review (“Nurse Review”) it was decided to bring all UK Research Councils (=Funding agencies) into a single organisation.
UKRI = UK Research and innovation:
will be born in April 2018
There has been a UKRI-wide group working for some time towards a National eInfrastructure for Research
Currently we are making a case to our ministry (BEIS) for investment in UKRI eInfratructure
So direction of travel in UK is:
joined up (shared) computing across STFC
(relevant to this meeting) working much more closely with large Astronomy projects
progress towards a National eInfrastructure for research
a push towards the “Cloud” where applicable.

13. GridPP Tier-2 Site Evolution
Envisage consolidating LHC disk at 4 sites for ATLAS and 1 for CMS.
Other sites may choose to host disk for other VOs.
Smaller sites will be CPU dominated with an appropriately sized disk cache.
For HEP, the Tier-1 and the 5 large Tier-2 sites become a single, but distributed, UK data lake (HSF CWP)?
2016 Snapshot
David Britton, University of Glasgow
SCF Meeting