1. Helge Meinhard, CERN-IT Grid Deployment Board 10-May-2017
Spring 2017 HEPiX meeting Wigner Research Centre / Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
Tony Wong, BNL
Helge Meinhard, CERN-IT
Grid Deployment Board
10-May-2017
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

2. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
HEPiX
Global organisation of service managers and support staff providing computing facilities for HEP community
Most WLCG sites, including WLCG Tier-0, Tier-1 and many Tier-2, represented
Other communities increasingly interested
Bioinformatics, photon science, ITER, astrophysics, …
Meetings are held twice per year
Thus far: spring in Europe, autumn in North America or Asia – 2018 will already be different
Reports on status and recent work, work in progress & future plans
Usually no showing-off, honest exchange of experiences
Web site:
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

3. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
HEPiX Spring 2017
Held 24 – 28 April at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, organised by the Wigner Research Centre (part of the Academy), Budapest
Wigner is home to CERN’s Tier-0 extension – visits organised
Sponsors: Dimension Data, Seagate, Supermicro
125 registered participants – very good attendance
Many first timers, many old friends
102 from Europe, 13 from Asia, 9 from North America, 1 from Israel
First time more from Asia than from North America
35+ different affiliations
Participants from astrophysics, life science, photon science, HPC, …
66 contributions (see later summaries)
Two-hour security workshop by Liviu Valsan / CERN
A call to coordinate response to security incidents among HEPIX sites
Full details:
Extensive workshop notes in preparation (yes, really – kindly contributed by Jérôme Belleman / CERN)
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

4. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Group Photo
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

5. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Tracks and Trends… (1)
Site reports – 18 contributions
Storage: Dropbox/ownCloud-based solutions; CEPH, EOS, GPFS, CVMFS, Hadoop; AFS on its way out (for example at CERN)
Data centre consolidation across research domains
CentOS / SL 7 on the rise
Grafana in widespread use
More sites migrating batch to Condor (with ARC CE or Condor CE)
Security and networking: 9 contributions
Security: As scary as ever!
Responses to compromises show lack of coordination, policy coherence, trust, forensics protocols etc.
IPv6 now turning focus on what does not work yet – now reality, soon large-scale production. Some Tier-2 sites progressing slowly
PerfSONAR well established in WLCG, proved very useful
ESnet outlook to 2025 – close coordination with WLCG needed
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

6. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Tracks and Trends… (2)
Storage and file systems: 8 contributions
CERN strategy: central role for EOS, Castor to be replaced by CTA
BNLbox: CEPH-based, HPSS access
Sponsor talk (Seagate) on technology evolution well received
CVMFS at RAL: features ACLs
CEPH presentations by RAL and LAL
Grids/clouds: 7 contributions
CRIC: cross-experiment information catalogue
ElastiCluster: set of cloud management tools
CERN Openstack update
RAL: Vendor-neutral access to cloud resources via Kubernetes
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

7. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Tracks and Trends… (3)
End-user IT services and operating systems: 2 contributions
CentOS 7 at CERN
‘Computing and Software for Big Science’ (CSBS) now operational – submit papers!
Computing and batch systems: 8 contributions
CosmoHub: Migrating from PostgreSQL to Hadoop/Hive; Hammercloud
KNL clusters at JLab and BNL: not without surprises
Benchmarking WG: More progress on fast benchmarks; starting requirements collection on precise benchmark
In-depth analysis of (non-)scalability of Haswell vs. IvyBridge: different behaviour of branch predictions
Singularity: traceability and job isolation, could help overcome need for gLExec
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

8. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Tracks and Trends… (4)
IT facilities and business continuity: 4 contributions
Wigner cooling control upgrade
CERN: water incident, 2nd network hub, potential 2nd data centre
Orsay data centre extension
Automatic handling of hardware failures at IN2P3-CC via hardware vendor APIs
Basic IT services: 8 contributions
Configuration management: Puppet (3 to 4 migration at CERN), Salt
Central ElasticSearch service at CERN: scaling and security challenging
Monitoring at CERN (WLCG+Farm), CNAF, LBNL
Syslog-ng from supplier and user (IN2P3-CC) perspective
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

9. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Next meetings
HTCondor workshop: DESY, Hamburg, Germany
06 – 09 June 2017
Autumn 2017: KEK, Tsukuba, Japan
16 – 20 October 2017
Co-organised with LHCOPN/LHCONE, co-hosted with HPSS user forum
Spring 2017: U Wisconsin, Madison, USA
14 – 18 May 2018
HTCondor week will start 21 May
Autumn 2018: Barcelona, Spain (organised by PIC)
08 – 12 October 2018
Some further proposals on the table reaching out as far as… 2021!
Expressions of interest and proposals are always welcome
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov

10. Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov
Questions, comments?
10-May-2017
Helge Meinhard (at) CERN .ch, tony (at) BNL.gov