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The HEPiX forum brings together worldwide Information Technology staff, including system administrators, system engineers, and managers from High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics laboratories and institutes, to foster a learning and sharing experience between sites facing scientific computing and data challenges.
Participating sites include BNL, CERN, DESY, FNAL, IHEP, IN2P3, INFN, IRFU, KEK, LBNL, NDGF, NIKHEF, PIC, RAL, SLAC, TRIUMF, many other research labs and numerous universities from all over the world.
This workshop is hosted by NeIC - the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration together with HPC2N - High Performance Computing Center North at Umeå University.
News and development at NDGF-T1
Site report and status update of Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) in Taiwan.
The presentation reports the running status and development progress at IHEP site since last HEPIX workshop.
A short update on what's new at INFN-T1 Data Center.
News from CERN since the last HEPiX workshop. This talk gives a general update from services in the CERN IT department.
In this talk, we report updates on the KEK site from the previous HEPiX workshop, mainly focusing on the Grid system configuration, status, and newly introduced IAM system.
We will present the site updates since the last Site Report, made in HEPiX Fall 2019.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron. Based on the RAL site, Diamond provides researchers with access to X-Ray techniques which are free at the point of use for academics.
This talk updates HEPiX on the latest developments at Diamond such as a new HPC scheduler, Kubernetes developments, MFA for SSH and staff changes.
RCAUTH.eu was set up as a PKIX translation service for AARC with high-availability in mind. This was implemented by using anycast, so the same service is delivered by separate organisations.
This demonstrates that even stateful services can be anycasted; it provides a reference HA infrastructure for EOSC core services and shows that building IP anycasted services does not have to be complex.
This talk was originally given at the recent EUGridPMA meeting.
An ambitious plan to modernize the web hosting infrastructure at CERN started in 2019, aiming at consolidating the various hosting technologies on a shared Kubernetes/Openshift platform.
In this talk I will present the design of the web hosting infrastructure resulting from this project and how we leveraged the Kubernetes operator pattern for site provisioning and configuration management.
I will also cover our choices and design decisions regarding the user interface for site management, the use of upstream components from the Kubernetes ecosystem and the integration of this Kubernetes-based infrastructure with CERN SSO and more generally the CERN computing environment.
The CERN IT Linux team, together with core services in CERN IT, have been reviewing the Red Hat ecosystem for our production services. In this presentation we will share our current assessment of the situation regarding Stream’s suitability, in particular with regards to stability and the handling of security vulnerabilities. Together with the state of the Enterprise Linux rebuilds, the RHEL license situation, and the community feedback this summary will feed into the plan to move forward to the next platform underpinning services provided by CERN IT.
Birds of a Feather session on experiences with CentOS Stream during the last year
The BigHPC project is bringing together innovative solutions to improve the monitoring of heterogeneous HPC infrastructures and applications, the deployment of applications and the management of HPC computational and storage resources. It aims as well to alleviate the current storage performance bottleneck of HPC services.
The BigHPC project will address these challenges with a novel management framework, for Big Data and parallel computing workloads, that can be seamlessly integrated with existing HPC infrastructures and software stacks.
The BigHPC project has the following main goals:
BigHPC platform is composed by the following main components:
For the BigHPC project, the main mission of the Monitoring Framework component is to empower users with a better understanding of their jobs workload and to help system admins to predict possible malfunctions or misbehaved applications. BigHPC will provide a novel distributed monitoring software component, targeted for Big Data applications, that updates the state of the art of previous solutions, by:
Virtual Manager (VM) is a component in the BigHPC implementation that aims to stage and execute application workloads optimally on one of a variety of HPC systems. It mainly consists of two subcomponents, ie. VM scheduler and VM repository.
The Virtual Manager Scheduler provides an interface to submit and monitor application workloads, coordinate the allocation of computing resources on the HPC systems, and optimally execute workloads by matching the workload resource requirements and QoS specified by the user with the available HPC clusters, partitions and QoS reported by the BigHPC Monitoring and Storage Manager components respectively.
Additionally, the Virtual Manager Repository provides a platform to construct and store the software services and applications that support BigHPC workloads as container images. It then provides those uploaded images in a programmatic way when a workload request is submitted to the Virtual Manager Scheduler for execution.
The storage performance has become a pressing concern in these infrastructures, due to high levels of performance variability and I/O contention generated by multiple applications executing concurrently. To address the previous challenge, storage resources are managed by following a design based on Software-Defined Storage (SDS) principles, namely through a control plane and data plane. With an architecture tailored for the requirements of data-centric applications running on modern HPC infrastructures, it is possible to improve I/O performance and manage I/O interference of HPC jobs with none to minor code changes to applications and HPC storage backends.
In order to keep all development tasks in a common path, some good practices are needed to get a shorter development life cycle and provide continuous delivery and deployment with software quality. All these BigHPC components are being tested on two different testbeds: development and preview. In the development testbed there is a workflow to test each platform component, where a pipeline allows to automate all required tasks related to software quality and validation. Afterwards, the components are tested in real infrastructure using the preview testbed, where the integration and performance tests take place.
The implementation of software quality and continuous deployment adopts a GitOPS set of practices that allow the delivery of infrastructure as code and application configurations using git repositories. In this work we are creating the git workflow being adopted for application development and the tools that we are joining together to answer the three components of GitOPS: infrastructure as code, merging changings together and deployment automation.
In this presentation, we will do a brief introduction of the BigHPC project, but focusing on the main challenges we found during this project, facing the goals of the project and the reality of HPC BigData environments concerning the integration tasks.
Machine learning (ML) has been shown to be an excellent method for improving performance in high-energy physics (HEP). Applications of ML in HEP are expanding, ranging from jet tagging with graph neural networks to fast simulations with 3DGANs and numerous classification algorithms in beam measurements. ML algorithms are expected to improve in performance as more data are collected during Run 3 and the high luminosity upgrade.
Computing infrastructure is required to support this new paradigm by providing a scalable ML platform for a myriad of users with existing and future use cases. In this talk, we present a general-purpose Kubeflow-based machine learning platform deployed at CERN. We present the platform features such as pipelines, hyperparameter optimization, distributed training, and model serving. We discuss infrastructure details, and the integration of accelerators and external resources. We discuss the existing use cases for the platform, along with a demonstration of the core functionalities.
We will update on current status and activities in the CERN batch infrastructure, before concentrating on an introduction to remediation automation. Stackstorm is an open source product which has allowed us to automate activities such as health checks, alarm handling and provide enriched data to L2/L3 support for incidents. We will explain a little of the deployment, the architecture of the product and how it integrates with other products such as our Monitoring stack - Monit, our state manager - BrainSlug and our Cloud infrastructure.
Short summary of the european HTC (condor) week held in Cuneo (10 - 14 october)
Report the progress made in the last six months to define the WLCG HEPscore benchmark. This is a joint work of the HEPiX Benchmark Working Group and the WLCG HEPscore deployment Task Torce.
Scheduling at large WLCG sites has to account for several peculiarities of the HEP usage profile: Prominently, the split into only 1-core and 8-core requests is known to lead to fragmentation. In addition, sites have to satisfy long-term and short-term fairshare, efficient job packing, internal flexibility and various other goals. Over the years, various strategies have been proposed in the community and implemented by sites at their own discretion.
We present a review of the strategies previously and currently used at the GridKa Tier 1 to tackle the HEP usage profile. We cover defragmentation, static versus dynamic partitioning, subgroups and more as well as their interplay. As a large grid site supporting several VOs and using the common HTCondor resource manager, we expect our experience to be applicable or at least educational for many sites.
News from National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University, Sweden.
The MUST datacenter (Mesocentre de l'université Savoie Mont Blanc et du CNRS) hosts the university's research computing resources and the IN2P3-LAPP WLCG Tier-2 site. It is also part of the EGI european federation. LHC computing activities of ATLAS and LHCb are supported at production level and remains the driving forces of the MUST datacenter. At the same time, the computing resources including CPU/GPU and storage are used by University researchers who develop and submit their own calculations from an interactive portal.
This site report will present the achieved and ongoing improvements in line with WLCG specifications for the HL-LHC era. Then focus will be given to the studies bridging the gap between the MUST datacenter and cloud environments and related to : infrastructure as code, evolution of AAI (openID, SAmL2, EduGAin)… The opportunity to quote some open questions could be taken as well.
An update on BNL activities since the Spring 2022 workshop
News from the lab
Round up from RAL
I was asked to do the Nikhef site report.
CERN IT’s OpenStack-based cloud service offers more than 300,000 cores to over 3,500 users via virtual machines or directly as bare metal servers. We will give an update on recent service developments, e.g. the automation of bare metal provisioning or the integration of ARM servers, current campaigns, such as the cold-migration of more than 4,000 VMs to a new network control plane, and a prospect on the upcoming activities, such as the upgrade of the compute control plane or the update of the O/S of the hypervisor fleet.
Network setup and design of the connection between CERN computer center and ALICE container hosting Infiniband setup. The infrastructure provides a total of 2.4Tbps capacity by using two DWDM (Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing) lines.
During 2022 CERN introduced permanent Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for accounts having access to critical services. The new login flow requires users to always login with a 2FA token (either TOTP or WebAuthn), introducing a significant security improvement for the individual and the laboratory. In this paper we will discuss the rationale behind the 2FA deployment, as well as the technical setup of 2FA in CERN's Single Sign-On system, Keycloak. We will share statistics on how users are responding to the change, and concrete actions we have taken thanks to their feedback. Finally, we briefly cover our custom extensions to Keycloak for specific use cases, which include, persistent cookies and our Kerberos setup.
This presentation provides an update on the global security landscape since the last HEPiX meeting. It describes the main vectors of risks and compromises in the academic community including lessons learnt, presents interesting recent attacks while providing recommendations on how to best protect ourselves.
The HEPiX IPv6 working group continues to track and encourage the deployment of dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 services. We also recommend dual-stack clients (worker nodes etc). Monitoring of data transfers shows that many are are happening today over IPv6 but it is still true that many are not! Our long-term aim is to move to an IPv6-only WLCG, so we need to discourage the use of IPv4 for data transfers. This talk will present our recent activities including new investigations for the reasons behind ongoing use of IPv4 as well as planning for the move to an IPv6-only core WLCG.
WLCG relies on the network as a critical part of its infrastructure and therefore needs to guarantee effective network usage and prompt detection and resolution of any network issues, including connection failures, congestion and traffic routing. The IRIS-HEP/OSG-LHC Networking Area is a partner of the WLCG effort and is focused on being the primary source of networking information for its partners and constituents. We will report on the changes and updates that have occurred since the last HEPiX meeting.
We will cover the status of, and plans for, the evolution of the WLCG/OSG perfSONAR infrastructure, as well as the new, associated applications that analyze and alert upon the metrics that are being gathered.
The high-energy physics community, along with the WLCG sites and Research and Education (R&E) networks are collaborating on network technology development, prototyping and implementation via the Research Networking Technical working group (RNTWG). As the scale and complexity of the current HEP network grows rapidly, new technologies and platforms are being introduced that greatly extend the capabilities of today’s networks. With many of these technologies becoming available, it’s important to understand how we can design, test and develop systems that could enter existing production workflows while at the same time changing something as fundamental as the network that all sites and experiments rely upon.
In this talk we’ll give an update on the Research Networking Technical working group activities, challenges and recent updates. In particular we’ll focus on the flow labeling and packet marking technologies (scitags), tools and approaches that have been identified as important first steps for the work of the group.
Germany is severely hit by energy price increases and an uncertain availability of power.
This has consequences also to the DESY laboratory.
We will show the overall situation of DESY, and reflect on some ideas for saving energy - with a focus on IT related topics.
This talk will give an overview of the hardware procurement activities carried in the IT department in the last 2-3 years, highlighting the achieved results in the acquisition of computing and storage equipment during LS2 and moving to the preparation for PCC.
Together with the figures and the data, it will also be covered how the recent issues in the global supply chain affected the procurement process, the infrastructure planning and the support for production hardware already deployed.
Finally, current and future hardware trends will be presented both in the context of the usage at CERN, for HEP and for IT services, as well as in the general market.
In last two years at CERN we have moved from spreadsheets / notes / printouts to an integrated environment allowing followup of the complete lifecycle of data center assets in a coherent and streamlined way and also providing assistance in planning for future hardware installations.
The talk will present current usage of OpenDCIM platform at CERN and outline its integration with other systems: Enterprise Asset Management, Network Database, Power and Environment monitoring, Ticket Management system and CERN Cloud environment. Future development ideas will be presented and (time permitting) a short live demonstration will be shown.
In 2007 HPC2N at Umeå University built a new computer room for air cooled high density computing (40+ kW/rack), and presented this over several HEPiX meetings.
This is a follow-up talk where we go over the design, how it turned out in practice, upgrades, experiences over 15 years in production, thoughts for the future, etc.
DPM storage support is gradually declining and it will be discontinued in the coming years. Computing sites with this grid storage must decide what to use as their future storage technology and each migration strategy comes with different requirements for site administrator expertise, operational effort and expected downtime. We will describe the dCache migration tool distributed with the recent DPM which provides quick and easy way to make one-to-one grid storage replacement transparent to the client applications with less than a day downtime. Several production storage endpoints were already migrated to dCache using this method recently EGI started "DPM migration and decommission" GGUS campaign, because we are getting close to the DPM EOL.
INFN CNAF is the National Center of INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) for research and development in the field of information technologies applied to high energies physics experiments. CNAF hosts the largest INFN data center, which also includes a WLCG Tier1 site.
We describe the technologies adopted at CNAF for Data Management and Data Transfer, namely XrootD and StoRM (with its StoRM WebDAV service), and the way our services are evolving in a worldwide context of new protocols and authorization approaches for bulk data transfers between WLCG sites.
In particular, we report on the challenging transititon from gsiftp to http protocol, which has been implemented via StoRM WebDAV for several experiments hosted at CNAF, and on the ongoing transition from X.509 certificates to JSON Web Tokens (JWT), allowing users to access the resources in a more fine-grained way.
Also, we detail on a few issues our daily management of storage services has brought to light.
CERNBox aims to bring the ease of a file sync and share service to scientific data processing at CERN. It provides a simple and uniform way to access over 15PB of research, administrative and engineering data across more than 2 billion files.
In this contribution we report on our experience and the challenges of taking an upstream sync and share service (ownCloud) and integrating it into CERN’s scientific services and workflows.
The result is a highly capable platform which allows access to scientific data through numerous protocols, applications (e.g. SWAN) and large-scale processing farms (e.g. lxbatch).
We report on recent evolution including privacy enhancements, prototype integrations with Rucio and CERN’s HPC system, evolving the existing integration with FTS for CMS’s Asynchronous Stage Out and exposure of CERN’s ATLAS group disk via CERNBox web.
We close with some observations on future work including synergies with other HEP sites and the federation potential of the system.
The CERN IT Storage group operates multiple distributed storage systems to support all CERN data storage requirements. Among these requirements, the storage and distribution of physics data generated by LHC and non-LHC experiments is one of the biggest challenges the group has to take on during Run-3.
EOS, the CERN distributed disk storage system is playing a key role in LHC data-taking. Since the beginning of the year 2022, more than 380PB have been written by the experiments and 2.4EB have been read so far. With the start of Run-3, the requirements in terms of data storage will be higher than what has been delivered so far.
The year 2022 was also marked by the decommissioning of the CASTOR service and its successful replacement by the CERN Tape Archive (CTA). This distributed tape storage system offers low-latency tape file archival and retrieval. CTA currently stores over 375 PB and this is expected to increase to more than 1 EB during Run-3.
The large-scale distribution of the data of the LHC stored on EOS and CTA across the WLCG is mainly ensured by the File Transfer Service (FTS). It offers a reliable, flexible and smart way of initiating data transfers and managing data archives between different storage endpoints all around the world.
In this presentation, we will show how all these different components interact with each other and the architecture and workflows in place to deliver the Run-3 resources in terms of data storage and provision.
In an attempt to stress test and gauge the throughput potentialof the new XRootD fronted CEPHFS storage element at the Lancaster WLCG Tier 2 a large scale atlas transfer of 100TB of data was initiated. This volume of data was pushed to the site over a period of 3 days and revealed unexpected bottlenecks and problems - of which raw network bandwidth was not one of them. The most notable issue was the timely calculation of the transferred file's checksums. These results have changed the site design to horizontally expand our xrootd infrastructure in response. This talk will detail the tests, our observations and conclusions, and the site's plans after taking the results into account.
Part of the mission of the Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is to provide access to storage service to a diverse range of HEP scientific experiments, e.g, LHC-ATLAS, Belle2, DUNE. An aggregate of 122M files and data storage of 76PBs is distributed and managed by independent storage instances for each VO. The underlying technology used to support such storage is dCache[1].
An overview of the BNL storage service archive, challenges and recent developments will be provided in this talk.
[1] https://www.dcache.org/
With the release of 4.0 dCache offers its transfer logs in form of a Kafka message stream. Since then the DESY dCache operations team has made heavy use of these for the monitoring of our installations as well as analytics in general. However, it has so far not been used for any of our production services.
On of our instances provides the underlying storage for our NextCloud instance. The way NextCloud operates it only recognizes files written byt itself unless a specific scan is made. This prevents making use of dCache's wide array of access protocols.
This talks shows how the storage events can be used to register files with NextCloud and how we can adapt this workflow to suit the needs of other experiments undertaken at DESY.
BNL recently implemented an efficient staging system between dCache and the backend HPSS tape storage. The system has three modules: the Endit Provider Plugin originated from NDGF, the ENDIT HPSSRetriever developed by BNL, and the optimized BNL’s HPSS Batch (ERADAT) system. This solution addresses performance bottlenecks in staging identified during the WLCG tape challenges. The system significantly improves overall tape staging performance through its asynchronous nature, alleviating heavy loads on stage hosts, and optimizing tape batch retrieval methods. As USATLAS dCache has demonstrated its effectiveness, we plan to extend this staging system to multiple instances of production dCache.