28 April 2003Imperial College1 Imperial College Site Report HEP Sysman meeting 28 April 2003

Imperial College2 Outline Equipment –what we have Software –what we use Activities –what we do Problems –all of the above

28 April 2003Imperial College3 Equipment Unix Servers & Desktops –2 x (Sun E450 servers, solaris 8, ~ 1Tbyte) one JREI funded BaBar resource, one general looking old and expensive now compared to… –Linux PC based servers and desktops 2 PC based raid servers, ~ 1 Tbyte each 4 dual processor, 2GHz, rack mounted, RH 7.3 for general interactive/batch use. Various individual Linux desktops (some Grid).

28 April 2003Imperial College4 Equipment Linux PC farms –BaBar Linux PC farm, from JREI. Main analysis facility for IC BaBar group. 2 dual CPU masters, 40 dual CPU workers. PBS batch system, ~300 Gbytes per master. –CMS/Grid PC farm 5 master nodes, 440 Gbytes disk each. 40 worker nodes. All are 1GHz dual PIII with 1GB of RAM per CPU. –LeSC grid resources

28 April 2003Imperial College5 Equipment Windows Servers and Desktops –Windows 2000 server & backup server group W2K domain accounts profiles, home directories, experiment areas domain printer queues –W2K and XP desktop PCs (~ 70 machines) current default desktop environment MS Office, windows ssh, Exceed, … some PCs with specialist software, e.g. CAD.

28 April 2003Imperial College6 Solaris Group Server Sun Enterprise E450 running Solaris 2.8 Three 400MHz processors Two network interfaces –100 Mbit/s to original subnet –1 Gbit/s to farm subnet ~ 1Tbyte disk, of which 800Mbytes Raid Web, , user accounts,...

28 April 2003Imperial College7 Software Unix: Solaris 2.8, Redhat Linux 7.3 –no user software supported on Solaris. –the usual Linux s/w + whatever experiment specific software we need. –Linux version is tied to experiments. Windows server and desktops –College deal provides standard MS Office products for licensed windows PCs.

28 April 2003Imperial College8 Activities HEP programme –BaBar, CMS, DØ, LHCb, Zeus, dark matter, neutrino factory, detector development –Considerable MC production for the experimental programmes Grid developments –see separate slides… Desktop Office applications

28 April 2003Imperial College9 LHCb MC production

28 April 2003Imperial College10 DØ MC production

28 April 2003Imperial College11 Grid Developments We are a testbed node –with CE, 8 WN (dual 1GHz PIII ) and 1 SE with ~440GB We run a resource broker (RB) –used as one of the 4 production RBs (others at CERN, Lyon, CNAF). –It is also the GridPP and BaBar RB

28 April 2003Imperial College12 Grid Developments We took part in the CMS Grid Stress test before Christmas. We run a production quality (?) SAM station which automatically delivers the data required by our DØ members. Have gridified (part) of the BaBar Farm ( MHz PIII).

28 April 2003Imperial College13 e-Science (not Grid) We are now making heavy use of Viking at LeSC –(132 Dual 2GHz Xeon nodes currently... new procurement currently underway and another in ~6 months). We also use the HSM hosted by Saturn (24 processor E TB of Disk 24TB tape space). –Have found issues with time outs as data transferred from tape.

28 April 2003Imperial College14 Current Issues: Server Suns are getting old and not cost- effective. –BaBar Sun is out of warranty, Group server will be next year. –Maintenance cost on the RAIDs for the Suns is too expensive and the disks are expensive. –CPU maint. only, assign some part of RAID as spares.

28 April 2003Imperial College15 Current Issues: Desktops Do we stick with Windows for the standard desktop ? –College policy is for Windows Desktop they also want complete control over all aspects of S/W installed, PC purchase, networking, “standardised desktop”. –Increasingly users want Linux desktop especially Grid developers many have only infrequent need for Windows.

28 April 2003Imperial College16 Current Issues: Desktops Dual booting is unattractive –experimenting with Terminal Server software for “occasional” Windows users. Seems to work well, but need to clarify licensing situation. Probably OK for us. Have considered providing laptops –many people are using laptops already as their default desktop machine, advantages when travelling, e.g. on LTA.

28 April 2003Imperial College17 Current Issues: Security College firewall –moving to default “deny all” policy this year. maybe even ssh blocked unless registered. –Already causing some problems with recent blocks on all ports > 1026 ftp call backs etc. a problem for Kerberised ftp to FNAL; needs PASV mode. Tough for emacs. Some problems for grid apps.

28 April 2003Imperial College18 Current Issues: Security Some Grid developments are clashing with needs for secure systems. –edg software still needs obsolete RH 6.2 –Most of our Grid developers are really ex- HEP RAs, not SW professionals. We need to make sure they are not cutting corners on security and compromising the rest of our systems for expediency. Of course they all want root access.

28 April 2003Imperial College19