Site report: CERN Helge.Meinhard (at) cern.ch HEPiX/HEPNT spring 2004 Edinburgh

2 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Structure, management As of 01 January 2004: DG (Aymar), CSO (Engelen), CFO (Naudi), 7 Departments IT Division has become IT Department Head: W. von Rüden, deputy: J. Ferguson All of previous IT Division Major part of AS Division: 3 groups working on AIS 2 groups merged (R. Martens) 1 group merged with DB group Printshop, document support from ETT Division Merged with user support (M. Draper)

3 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Computer Security AFS password expiration in force 12 months, like other services (e.g. NICE) Insecure protocols (e.g. ftp) banned for off-site traffic Biggest challenge are viruses and worms Visitor / unmanaged PCs, dual-boot systems

4 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (1) Quattor / Lemon deployment Moving ahead, major benefits German Cancios talk Lemon status display, combined metrics Miroslaw Sikets talk LEAF State Management System taking shape, being integrated with other tools System administration 2 nd level of 3-level support model Team now 7 people In full swing, all major clusters under their responsibility

5 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (2) CC refurbishment ongoing Civil engineering work for bunker for new 18 kV substation completed Right-hand side of large machine room ready Emptying left-hand side has begun, to be completed by July Disk and tape servers: re-installed with standard configuration More details: Tim Smiths talk

6 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (3) Procurements Tenders open for white boxes (presumably…) and SATA-based disk servers Preparing tenders for disk arrays for autumn Documents for Market Survey for purchases in 2006…2008 drafted Serial consoles All hardware procured (LSZH cables - major amount of work) Decision to use SLAC software, collaboration with Chuck First machines wired up, first users relying on service Stress tests for new and repaired machines Following implementation at SLAC Now part of standard procedure Handled by Sysadmin team

7 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Architecture and Data Challenges (1) CERN Openlab Workshops on total cost of ownership, and on security held Oracle joined as full partner, Voltaire joined as a contributor Detailed studies Fast interconnects Disk server performance: Choice of RAID, file system,... Jan Ivens talk Storage performance measurements at Caspur

8 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Architecture and Data Challenges (2) Linux certification: CEL3 nearing completion CERN recompile of RHEL 3 sources Aim to provide lxplus/lxbatch like service by end May 2004 CERN 7.3 will be supported until end 2004 Jarek Poloks talk Considering (and testing) RHEL Panel and discussion Data challenges of CMS and Alice completed, Atlas and LHCb started New stager, Storage Resource Manager Olof Bärrings talk

9 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Data Bases (1) To date: too much depends on good will and good luck Vision: Taking advantage of reorganisation Re-evaluate services Streamline architectures, configurations, processes Simplify management, maintenance and trouble- shooting Improve security, test regularly SLAs (realistic, measurable) and quality control Required for scalability in the future

10 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Data Bases (2) Openlab work: 2 Oracle-funded fellows Evaluation of Oracle 10g Database Application Server and Enterprise Manager Features to evaluate: Cross-platform transportable table spaces Stand-by data bases Replications/streams Native numbers EZ install

11 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Data Bases (3) LCG services – data challenges CMS DC04 (April/May 2004) Smooth running on Physics Sun Cluster after close collaboration with users First full-scale production usage of LCG file catalog (RLS): performance problem of middleware, IT-GD working Other data challenges starting, continuing to stress the Physics Sun cluster and the RLS Future: investigate Oracle Streams for LCG file catalog replication, deploy stand-by DB and (later) Oracle application server and DB clusters

12 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Data Bases (4) POOL: Persistency framework for LHC Use Root I/O to stream data to files Successfully deployed during CMS DC04, Atlas and LHCb to test in their DCs Alice keeps using Root directly Workarounds implemented to cope with RLS middleware performance limitations New Oracle contract Based on named users Platform and location independent More Application Server licences Maintenance costs reduced and fixed for 9 years Extended to all CERN staff + users (includes remote usage for CERN related work) Distribution has been prepared (support concerns)

13 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Grid Deployment LCG status Oliver Keebles talk LCG user registration, VO management Maria Dimous talk

14 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Internet Services Mail migration (to Exchange servers) completed – users migrated Windows terminal servers adopted as a service, 227 users during first months Access to CERN DFS via WebDAV adopted as a service Windows screen saver for production field- proven, deployment imminent Fighting effects of Sasser worm

15 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Product Support (1) Contract for distributed computing support retendered Won by SERCo Being prepared to be in full operation by 1 st July 2004 CVS services Two flavours, one with repositories on AFS (more fail- safe), one with local repositories – 4 machines each Major projects migrated to this service (e.g. Atlas offline) Manuel Guijarros talk

16 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Product support (2) Solaris Status and plans Manuel Guijarros talk Ximian connector Source code released by Novell Direct MAPI access, including advanced features such as shared calendaring PS evaluating deployment on Linux and Solaris using Evolution as mail client Busy preparing CHEP…

17 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report User and Document Services InDiCo: Web application for organising conferences Mick Drapers talk Major changes to Computing Helpdesk as a consequence of retendered Distributed Computing Support contract More people at centralised (building 513) helpdesk, less local support

18 Helge Meinhard (at) cern.chHEPiX Edinburgh: CERN site report Communication Systems Internet Land Speed record: 6.25 Gb/s between Los Angeles and Geneva Smooth migration to new GSM operator (Sunrise) Portable registration enforced ACB (Automatic call-back) shutdown: 01-Jul-2004: Call-in only 31-Dec-2004: End of service Recommended replacement: ISPs on open market