Information Technologies Department

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Information Technologies Department
Tour of CERNComputer Center and the Grid at CERN
Welcome!
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Computing at CERN
IT Department

1. General Purpose Computing Environment
2. Administrative Computing Services
3. Physics and engineering computing
4. Consolidation, coordination and standardization
   of computing activities
5. Physics applications(e.g., for data
   acquisition/offline analysis)
6. Accelerator design and operations

http//cern.ch/it
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LHC Data every year
1 Megabyte (1MB) A digital photo 1 Gigabyte
(1GB) 1000MB 5GB A DVD movie 1 Terabyte
(1TB) 1000GB World annual book production 1
Petabyte (1PB) 1000TB Annual production of one
LHC experiment 1 Exabyte (1EB) 1000 PB 3EB
World annual information production

• 40 million collisions per second
• After filtering, 100 collisions of interest per
  second
• gt 1 Megabyte of data digitised per collision
  recording rate gt 1 Gigabyte / sec
• 1010 collisions recorded each year stored
  data gt 15 Petabytes / year

CMS
LHCb
ATLAS
ALICE
http//cern.ch/lhc
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LHC Data every year
LHC data correspond to about 20 million CDs each
year
Where will the experiments store all of these
data?
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LHC Data Processing
LHC data analysis requires a computing power
equivalent to 100,000 of today's fastest PC
processors
Where will the experiments find such a computing
power?
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Computing power available at CERN

• High-throughput computing based on reliable
  commodity technology
• More than 8500 CPUs in about 3500 boxes (Linux)
• 4 Petabytes on 14000 drives (NAS Disk storage)
• 10 Petabytes on 45000 tape slots with 170 high
  speed drives

Nowhere near enough!
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Computing for LHC

• Problem even with Computer Centre upgrade,
  CERN can provide only a fraction of the necessary
  resources

• Solution Computing centers, which were
  isolated in the past, will be connected,
  uniting the computing resources of particle
  physicists worldwide

Europe 267 institutes 4603 users Ailleurs
208 institutes 1632 users
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What is the Grid?

• The World Wide Web provides seamless access to
  information that is stored in many millions of
  different geographical locations

• In contrast, the Grid is an emerging
  infrastructure that provides seamless access to
  computing power and data storage capacity
  distributed over the globe

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One Web but many Grids
Grid development has been initiated by the
academic, scientific and research community, but
industry is also interested.

• UK e-Science Grid
• Netherlands VLAM, PolderGrid
• Germany UNICORE, Grid proposal
• France Grid funding approved
• Italy INFN Grid
• Eire Grid proposals
• Switzerland - Network/Grid proposal
• Hungary DemoGrid, Grid proposal
• Norway, Sweden - NorduGrid

• NASA Information Power Grid
• DOE Science Grid
• NSF National Virtual Observatory
• NSF GriPhyN
• DOE Particle Physics Data Grid
• NSF TeraGrid
• DOE ASCI Grid
• DOE Earth Systems Grid
• DARPA CoABS Grid
• NEESGrid
• DOH BIRN
• NSF iVDGL

• DataGrid (CERN, ...)
• EuroGrid (Unicore)
• DataTag (CERN,)
• Astrophysical Virtual Observatory
• GRIP (Globus/Unicore)
• GRIA (Industrial applications)
• GridLab (Cactus Toolkit)
• CrossGrid (Infrastructure Components)
• EGSO (Solar Physics)

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1. Sharing resources on a global scaleMain
issues are trust, different management policies,
virtual organisations, 24 hour access and
support.2. SecurityMain issues are well-defined
yet flexible rules, authentication,
authorisation, compatibility and standards3.
Balancing the load This is more than just cycle
scavenging, (SETI_at_home), need middleware to
monitor and broker resources 4. The death of
distanceNetworks delivered 56Kb/s 10 years
ago,now we have 155Mb/s,for the LHC anticipate
10 Gb/s5. Open standardsGrid standards are
converging, and include Web services, the
GlobusToolkit, various protocols
What are the principles behind the Grid? 5 big
ideas
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Grid applications for Science

• Medical/Healthcare (imaging, diagnosis and
  treatment )
• Bioinformatics (study of the human genome and
  proteome to understand genetic diseases)
• Nanotechnology (design of new materials from the
  molecular scale)
• Engineering (design optimization, simulation,
  failure analysis and remote instrument access
  and control)
• Natural Resources and the Environment
  (weather forecasting, earth observation,
  modeling and prediction of complex systems)

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Grid_at_CERN

• CERN projects
• LHC Computing Grid (LCG)
• EU funded projects led by CERN
• Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE)
• others
• Industry funded projects
• CERN openlab for DataGrid applications

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LCG LHC Computing Grid

• Timeline
• 2002 start project
• 2003 2003 service opened (LCG-1 started in
  September with 12 sites)
• 2004 LCG-2 released
• 2002 - 2005 deploy the LCG environment
• 2006 2008 build and operate the LCG service

• As of April 2007
• biggest Grid project in the world
• 177 sites in more than 30 countries
• 30000 processors
• 14 millions Gigabytes storage

http//cern.ch/lcg
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The EGEE vision
Access to a production quality GRID will change
the way science and much else is done in Europe
An international network of scientists will be
able to model a new flood of the Danube in real
time, using meteorological and geological data
from several centres across Europe.
A team of engineering students will be able to
run the latest 3D rendering programs from their
laptops using the Grid.
A geneticist at a conference, inspired by a talk
she hears, will be able to launch a complex
biomolecular simulation from her mobile phone.
http//www.eu-egee.org
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Openlab for Datagrid Applications

• Objectives
• Build an ultrahigh performance computer
  cluster
• Link it to the DataGrid and test its
  performance
• Evaluate potential of future commodity
  technology for LCG

http//cern.ch/openlab
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Computer Centre Tour

• Ground Floor
• OpenLab equipment of the future
• CIXP CERN Internet Exchange Point
• Basement
• Storage Silos gt10 petabytes
• PC farm gt3000 PC aligned

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To know more about the Grid