1. Alice Operations In France
Laurent Aphecetche
Yannick Patois

2. Summary France in WLCG France in Alice Alice in France
LCG-FR organization
One year with Alice at CC
Site issues with Alice

3. France in WLCG
With about 10% of CPU shares, France is the fourth most important Region in WLCG.
Note that Disk and Tape shares follow about the same partition even if not shown.

4. France in Alice
Alice's representation is even higher, France is on of the largest contributing region for Alice.

5. Alice in France
LCG-France sites. Alice sites noted with Alice's red symbol.

6. French Alice sites CPU share

7. Evolutions of Alice CPU usage in France during the last few years
- Evolution has been good until now, following negotiated pledges.
- However the future of the financing of Grid programs is rather dark in France. We likely wont be able to follow the same pace in 2012, and maybe worse in 2013 and beyond

8. Organization of LCG-France
Project started in 2004, with following goals:
Creation of a WLCG T1
Creation of several T2 and T3 across France
Organization
Scientific Project Leader: Fairouz Malek
Technical Project Leader: Frédérique Chollet
CC-IN2P3 Tier-1 and AF Tier-2 representative : Pierre Girard
Alice support at Tier-1 : Renaud Vernet
T2/T3 technical coordinator (YP).

9. General meetings of LCG-France
Executive Board (meets 1-2 times a year):
Follow the project, validate decisions
National representatives of experiments (Yves Schutz for Alice), and representatives/delegates of involved/funding agencies (CNRS/IN2P3 and CEA/IRFU).
delegates from nationals agencies involved (IN2P3 and IRFU).
Chaired by the Scientific Director of IN2P3.
Steering Board (meets once a month)
Share of resources among experiments and sites. Sites organization.
National computing coordinators of experiments (Laurent Aphecetche for Alice), sites coordinators (computing and scientific), and computing delegates from IN2P3 and IRFU
Chaired by project leaders.

10. T2/T3 coordination at LCG-France
T2/T3 technical Coordination
Created in 2006
Tasks:
Coordinates T2/T3 sites activities
Enhance knowledge about hardware (CPU, disks, etc.) by sharing information about recent tested hardware
Ensure that French sites in contact with WLCG GDB by sending delegates and reporting issues both ways.
Share everyday operations problems, seek help and provide solutions.
Regular communication between experiments and sites.
Note: Our T1 also have a T2 part, so CCIN2P3 is represented there too.

11. T2/T3 coordination at LCG-France
Tools
Mailing-list
Wiki (

12. Quattor usage at LCG-France
But for CC, most sites use Quattor for site configuration
Quattor takes care of node installation (from PXE) and configuration (RPM package lists, configuration files, and operations)
Homogeneity and sharing of configuration
LAL (Michel Jouvin, Guillaume Philippon) is the main french contributor, but IPHC (Jérôme Pansanel) and several others give updates, fixes and enhancements.

13. One year with Alice at CCIN2P3
Xrootd migration from Solaris to Linux
About 900TB online
Bittorrent used for the Software Area
Prospect in the future of Alice computing
Parallel jobs, GPU usage, etc. : CCIN2P3 will contribute with a custom Alice testbed at CC
LAF - Lyon Analysis Facility (see next slide)

14. Alice LAF At CC-IN2P3
Renaud Vernet

15. Alice LAF At CC-IN2P3
LAF is for all LHC experiments. Only Alice and Atlas showed an interest so far
37 TB of disk storage
256 cores (16 workers)
But currently not enough used (but for storage)
Now testing a few nodes under AAF (using Alice version of the AF softwares), expecting more Alice users to join. We want you now.

16. LCG-France Sites and Alice issues
Oversized jobs
Some jobs eat all the available RAM+Swap
Some workarounds have been implemented by some sites
Alice installed it's own monitoring system ← is it effective?
Didn't heard about any big problem since quite some time
2GB/job limit has been reconfirmed at latests GDB
Xrootd
Imply some more site configuration (but then works pretty well)
But little control over it (for my understanding)

17. Comments, questions? ?