1. INFN Site Report R.Gomezel October 9-13, 2006 Jefferson Lab, Newport News

2. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 2 Network Connectivity CNAF Tier-1 site is now connected at 10GE to GARR backbone There is a second 10GE access completely dedicated to LCG All Tier-2 sites are now interconnected via link at 1GE GARR backbone access to GEANT2:10GE (and more than one) Future: GARR-x: links at 40-100Gbps (2008)

3. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 3 Cluster File system GPFS has been adopting in several sites as shared-disk file system for computing farm It shows a reliable and robust behavior Lustre has been tested by Tier-1 staff but GPFS is used in production Sometimes troubles seen while exporting file system on clients running SL3 via nfs After the first access to the file system exported we started getting a “NFS Stale File Handle” message (not always but very often)

4. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 4 Batch system As reported last year, Tier-1 makes 5000 LSF licences available for INFN sites needing them via a central server in Bologna So an increasing number of sites are moving to LSF batch system for local computing environment This is leading to a uniform and wide-spread adoption of LSF as a batch system in different sites

5. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel INFN Tier2 Update (by M.Morandin) Development of Tier2 centres has been actively pursued in 2006 by the LHC INFN groups emphasis on building the new facilities in terms of coherent Tier2 federations indeed INFN pledge to LCG is in term of a global INFN Tier2 federation

6. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Tier2 sites approved first batch of Tier2 sites for Alice, Atlas and CMS have been selected and approved for funding by INFN management: Catania [Alice] LNL (Legnaro National Laboratory) [CMS] Napoli [Atlas] Roma [Atlas and CMS] Torino [Alice] but other sites are very active and participate in the Tier2 buid-up process in addition, a Tier2 facility for LHC-b, dedicated to Monte Carlo production, will be hosted by CNAF in Bologna

7. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Infrastructure at Tier2 sites all these sites are served by 1 Gbps links to the GARR backbone and are well integrated in the INFN Grid infrastructure significant upgrades of the cooling and electrical systems are under way at all sites to accommodate the computing resources up to and beyond 2010 ( 5-8 racks, ~ 100 kW heat removal rate capacity per site)

8. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel Profile of computing resources deployment all sites have been actively involved with the Service Challenges and other activities especially during the summer '06 new LHC start-up schedule well matches INFN prudent approach to Tier2 initial grow funding has been secured for a moderate increase of the computing resources in 2007

9. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 9 Storage Update (by A.Brunengo –A.Tirel) SAN-based infrastructure is still the preferred solution to make storage system available to computing units Expertise in design and planning is getting increased INFN Storage WG started testing iSCSI technology to find out if it could be an efficient alternative to Fibre Channel solution for computing farm

10. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 10 iSCSI Testbed Testbed iSCSI@INFN-Trieste

11. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 11 iSCSI testbed configuration Dual Opteron dual core 2.2 Ghz servers used in tests with 4GB RAM equipped each with 2 GE interfaces Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5704 Two of them equipped with HBA(Host Bus Adapter) iSCSI (Qlogic QLA4022) iSCSI Box details: Network Appliance FAS3020 based on Xeon processor, 2 GB RAM and 512 MB di NVRAM, 4 Gb Ethernet ports (iSCSI), 2 FC ports at 2 Gb/s, 1 SCSI port and 14 250 GB ATA disks connected via FC to FAS 4 logical units of 300 GB each configured for test activity Operating System used on servers SLC 4.3 on monitoring node (iscsi-mon) SL 3.0.5 Ganglia integrated with Performance Co-Pilot used for monitoring testsPerformance Co-Pilot Linux Test Project tool disktest used for performance evaluation

12. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 12 iSCSI test results Tests accomplished running 4 parallel threads Other parameters introduced: Jumbo Frame usage TCP Segmentation Offload different block size The table gives a results overview (for 64KB block size) CPU load was 5% using HBA interface and 20-25% without it OperationHBAMTUMB/s READNO150058.75 WRITENO150060.22 READYES150070.89 WRITEYES150067.41 READNO900050.81 WRITENO900061.18 READYES900053.34 WRITEYES900071.79

13. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 13 iSCSI: preliminary conclusions throughput is acceptable but not completely satisfying (<70 MB/s) but more and different tests must be done HBA needed to reduce CPU load path failover is functional and satisfying failover of Qlogic driver has not been tested yet future test in more complex environment tens of clients, parallel file system access, access type

14. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 14 Future testing activity EMC is going to provide us an iSCSI device to verify performance Tests are supposed to be concluded by the end of the year Test of a home made solution is under evaluation in order to compare performance and price with commercial devices It could be a better solution especially to have the freedom of buying disks at market price, not dependent from vendor price model

15. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 15 TRIP: a model for Wireless authentication TRIP is a project evaluated last year in order to provide a common infrastructure allowing INFN users to get easily access to wireless network available in INFN sites without the need to ask for site-specific authentication Authentication for INFN users: based on EAP-TTLS using a distributed architecture of radius servers configured in INFN sites There is a national radius server redirecting the client authentication request to the local radius server of the site the user belongs to Authentication for guest users: based on a captive portal forces a user that needs to have access to the network to be redirected to a web page in order to get credentials for authentication Most of units implemented the facility allowing roaming users to get authentication as if they were at local site

16. HEPiX Fall 2006 Meeting INFN Site Report – R.Gomezel 16 LDAP: directory service An increasing number of INFN sites are adopting LDAP to allow user’s authorization to resources and applications Every site is now using a site specific configuration A group is evaluating the opportunity and feasibility to define a model for a nation- wide authorization model