HEPiX Spring 2024 Workshop

15 Apr 2024, 08:00 → 19 Apr 2024, 13:00 Europe/Paris

Amphithéatre Buffon (Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) de l'Université Paris-Cité)

Helge Meinhard (CERN), Peter van der Reest (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY), Tomoaki Nakamura, Ofer Rind (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

HEPiX Spring 2024 in Paris, France

The latest edition of the more than 30 years-old series of workshops of learning and sharing experiences and establishing contacts between sites facing scientific computing and data challenges is over! It featured thematic sessions on the future of Linux in the community and on deploying dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 connectivity to site computing services. There have been technical presentations by some vendors including our sponsor Seagate and invited presentations by other science communities allied to HEP. With all that and the abstracts submitted for the various tracks, we had a very successful, productive, informative, interesting and inspiring week full of exchanges and networking. Join us at future workshops and tell us about your projects, ideas, experiences (successes as much as failures), issues and so on!

More information about the HEPiX workshops, the working groups (who report regularly at the workshops) and other events is available on the HEPiX Web site.

The workshop was hosted by the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (IRFU) of CEA Saclay and was held at the Amphithéatre Buffon of the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC) of the Université Paris-Cité in the city centre of Paris (13th arrondissement, 15 rue Hélène Brion, 75013 Paris) not far from the François Mitterrand library.

Acknowledgement (in French): Ce travail bénéficie d'une aide de l'État au titre de France 2030 (P2I -Graduate School Physique) portant la référence ANR-11-IDEX-0003.

Monday, 15 April

08:00 Registration

Welcome

Convener: Helge Meinhard (CERN)

1 CEA-IRFU

Speakers: Andrea Formica (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)), Andrea Formica (CEA Irfu/Lilas)

Irfu-EN-AF-V2-2024-exp.pdf

2 Workshop logistics

Speakers: Imed Magroune (CEA/DRF/IRFU/DEDIP//LIS), Joël Surget, Dr Pierre-Francois Honore

Welcome Hepix 2024 Paris.pdf

Welcome Hepix 2024 Paris.pdf

Welcome Hepix 2024 Paris.pptx

Site reports

Conveners: Andreas Petzold (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)), Dr Sebastien Gadrat (CCIN2P3 - Centre de Calcul (FR))

3 SiteReport IRFU/GRIF-IRFU

We present an update of the changes at our site since the last report. Advancements, developments, roadblocks and achievements made concerning various aspects including: WLCG, Unix, Windows, Infrastructure, will be presented.

Speaker: Sophie Catherine Ferry (Université Paris-Saclay (FR))

SiteReport-Irfu-sferry24-pub2.pdf

4 CC-IN2P3 Site Report

We will present a follow-up on the activities on-going at the CC-IN2P3 since the last site report done in Fall 2022.

Speaker: Mattieu PUEL

CC-IN2P3 site report.pdf

5 KEK Site Report

The KEK Central Computer System (KEKCC) provides large-scale computing resources, including Grid computing systems and essential IT services, to support many research activities in KEK. We will report on the current status of KEKCC in this presentation.

Speaker: Tomoe Kishimoto

2024_04_15.pdf

6 GSI Site Report

Recent developments at GSI IT

Speaker: Mr Christopher Huhn

GSI Site Report Hepix Paris 24.pdf

10:30 Coffee

Site reports

Conveners: Andreas Petzold (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)), Dr Sebastien Gadrat (CCIN2P3 - Centre de Calcul (FR))

7 ASGC Site Report

Update of the WLCG and Scientific computing services, technology and resource at ASGC.

Speaker: Mr Eric YEN (ASGC)

ASGC-HEPiXSpring2024v2.pdf

8 RAL Site Report

Updates from RAL

Speaker: Martin Bly (STFC-RAL)

2024-04-15_19 HEPiX Spring Paris - RAL Site Report.pdf

2024-04-15_19 HEPiX Spring Paris - RAL Site Report.pptx

9 CERN site report

News from CERN since the last HEPiX workshop. This talk gives a general update from services in the CERN IT department.

Speaker: Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN)

CERN Site Report_v1.pdf

10 BNL Site Report

An update on recent developments at the Scientific Data & Computing Center (SDCC) at BNL.

Speaker: Thomas Smith

HEPiX 2024 BNL site report.pdf

11 IHEP Site Report

IHEP operates a comprehensive infrastructure comprising an HTC cluster, HPC cluster, and WLCG grid site, dedicated to facilitating data processing for over 20 experiments. Additionally, ongoing research in AI and QC is actively pursued.

Recently, we expanded our local HTC cluster by integrating it with 250 worker nodes from a remote Slurm cluster through gliding job slots. This enhancement significantly boosts our computational capabilities.

Furthermore, IHEP established the LHCb Tier 1, poised to commence operations within the current year.

Moreover, the construction of new machine room for the High Energy Physics Synchrotron (HEPS) has been completed.

Speaker: Dr Jingyan Shi

IHEP Site Status.pdf

12:15 Lunch

Site reports

Conveners: Andreas Petzold (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)), Dr Sebastien Gadrat (CCIN2P3 - Centre de Calcul (FR))

12 DESY site report

DESY site report

Speaker: Yves Kemp (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DE))

DESY-site-report-April2024-kemp.pdf

13 AGLT2 Site Update

We will present an update on our site since the Spring 2023 report, covering our changes in software, tools and operations.

The three primary areas to report on our work on performance evaluation with ZFS vs. Dell RAID systems, our plans and status for our transition from EL7 to RHEL9 and the work to deploy an operational WLCG Security operations Center implementation.

We conclude with a summary of what has worked and what problems we encountered and indicate directions for future work.

Speaker: Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

AGLT2 Site Report - HEPiX Spring 2024

AGLT2SiteReport-HEPiXSpring2024.pdf

Linux future

Conveners: Helge Meinhard (CERN), Michel Jouvin (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)), Ofer Rind (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

14 The state of AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux has been chosen by many across the world as the replacement for CentOS Linux, but there is still a lot of confusion around AlmaLinux's governance and build pipeline. Given AlmaLinux's newness and the instability in the greater enterprise Linux ecosystem, a strong understanding of how and where AlmaLinux OS started, where AlmaLinux it is today, and where we expect to go in the future is critical to many of our users. This talk will address all of that and more.

Speaker: benny Vasquez (AlmaLinux OS Foundation)

AlmaLinux - HEPiX Spring 2024.pdf

15 Debian: What it is and what it can do for science

Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont

Overview of the Debian Project - Nicolas Dandrimont.pdf

16 Experience with migrating to Debian

Speaker: Mr Dennis van Dok (Nikhef)

Experiences with upgrading from CentOS 7 to Debian

17 Discussion

15:00 Coffee

Linux future

Conveners: Helge Meinhard (CERN), Michel Jouvin (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)), Ofer Rind (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

18 From Entanglement to Duality: Preparing a multi-ecosystem Linux strategy at CERN

The recent turmoils in the Red Hat ecosystem and the corresponding uncertainties they created in the HEP community have triggered the CERN Linux team to review their options for a multi-year Linux strategy. This presentation will summarise the state of Linux at CERN and discuss options moving forward as input to the Linux-themed discussion at this HEPiX meetup.

Speaker: Dr Arne Wiebalck (CERN)

From Entanglement to Duality_ Preparing a multi-ecosystem Linux strategy at CERN - HEPiX 15 Apr 2024.pptx.pdf

Linux Roadmap FNAL.pdf

19 Status and plans at DESY

Speaker: Yves Kemp (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DE))

DESY-linux-bof-kemp.pdf

20 Dealing with CentOS 7 EOL

Round-table of sites

PDFs.pdf

21 Discussion

17:30 Welcome reception

Tuesday, 16 April

08:30 Registration

Storage and file systems

Conveners: Dr Andrew Pickford (Nikhef), Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN)

22 CernVM-FS 2.11: Lessons learnt from large-scale data processing at Jump Trading

The CernVM File System (CVMFS) provides the software distribution backbone for High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments and many other scientific communities in the form of a globally available, shared, read-only filesystem. However recently, CVMFS has found major adoption beyond academia: in particular Jump Trading, an algorithmic and high-frequency trading firm, now uses CVMFS for software and data distribution at scales that surpass any prior usage, pushing the software to its limits. In this talk, we present the latest enhancements that enable this use-case, thanks to the support and contributions of Jump Trading and the close collaboration of their engineers with the CVMFS development team. Concretely, we report on the operational improvements that allow Jump Trading to deploy the latest CVMFS release for their highly parallelized workloads, and current plans for further performance gains.

Speakers: Matt Harvey (Jump Trading), Valentin Volkl (CERN)

2024-04-16-CVMFS-Hepix-1.pdf

HEPIX-CVMFS-Presentation-JUMP.pdf

HEPIX-CVMFS-Presentation-JUMP.pptx

23 Enabling LHC Run 3 data storage workflows at CERN

CERN Storage and Data Management group is responsible for ensuring that all data produced by physics experiments at CERN is safely stored and reliably accessible by the user community. 2023 Run-3 and especially the Heavy Ion Run have pushed further the previous records in terms of data volume and transfer rates delivered by the main LHC experiments. The targets anticipated by the data management coordinators were successfully accommodated by the main storage solutions provided by the Storage group, namely: EOS, CTA (tape storage) and FTS (data transfer orchestration). The EOS service is the main entry point for all data acquisition workflows and has demonstrated reliable operation and excellent peak performance throughout Run 3. In practice, this means that target rates of 10-20 GB/s where regularly surpassed with peaks of 25-30 GB/s for CMS, ATLAS and ALICE experiments.

Distribution of all this data as well as storing the custodial copy on tape required the orchestration capabilities of FTS that successfully met user’s expectations and also ensured a good utilization of the tape infrastructure. The most demanding use-case was represented by ALICEO2 which achieved data rates of over 150GB/s using erasure encoded layouts and its own workflow for data distribution. In this presentation, we go over the archived rates and general performance for both the disk and the tape services. Looking towards the restart of Run-3, we detail foreseen challenges and lessons learned during this exceptional period of data taking.

Speaker: Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN)

Enabling LHC Run 3 data storage workflows at CERN.pdf

24 Performance of Cluster File System Backed by an HDD-Based Data Storage System Under True Concurrent Read-Write Load

Despite of the growing number of flash-based data storage systems the usage of spinning disks (HDDs) for large on-line data storage systems is still advantageous. Measurements of the read-write behaviour of a cluster file system using external storage controllers backed by HDDs are presented. Contrary to commonly expected balanced read and write rates, resp., or even read rates slightly outbalancing write rates by far prevailing write rates were seen. Starting point was the test procedure required in a Call for Tenders which turned out to be totally inadequate to characterize the system behaviour. A more thorough approach showed that in true parallel read-write traffic attempting to maximise both data streams the read rate is about one order smaller than the write rate. Possible Explanations are considered and some discussion of the results is given.

Speaker: Uwe Falke (KIT SCC , GridKa)

HEPiX24.047.0416_0950.Uwe_Falke.pdf

25 Future of Hard Drives

Most data center data is stored on hard drives. But can they compete in the future, and what is the role and future of hard drives and the different hard drive technologies available? The challenge is efficiently scaling storage infrastructure while optimizing for write/read performance, TCO, and sustainability goals.

In this session, we will explore how areal density and the latest hard drive technology deliver on Scale, TCO, and Sustainability to manage the data explosion. We will also discuss key technology features and hard drive innovations that mark an inflection point for hard drive storage.

Until now, it was not possible to increase capacity without increasing form factor and using more resources. Culminating in a breakthrough collection of Nobel Prize-winning nanoscale technologies, Mozaic 3+™ is a new hard drive platform that incorporates the unique implementation of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR).
Its high magnetic coercivity media overcomes magnetic instability to deliver unprecedented areal density of 3TB per platter (4TB+ and 5TB+ in the coming years) and capacity points of 30TB and beyond.
Use it like a regular hard disk drive; written data will never fluctuate—it can only be rewritten with its plasmonic writer, ensuring data durability and achievability on hard drives.
This session will also include a live demo of the latest Mozaic 3+ hard drives.

Speaker: Mr Hugo Bergmann

HEPiX Spring_Workshop_Paris 2024_The Future of Hard Drives.pdf

10:40 Coffee

Basic and end-user IT services

Conveners: Mr Dennis van Dok (Nikhef), Jingyan Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN))

26 Monitoring the Green IT Cube

Managing a data center poses multifaceted challenges, with monitoring emerging as a pivotal aspect for ensuring stability and service quality assurance. Since the first implementation of a monitoring system in the Green IT Cube data center at GSI in 2016, comprising RRDtool and Ganglia, ongoing efforts have been dedicated to enhancing monitoring capabilities. The initial system's tight integration between data storage and visualization layers, along with missing essential features, limited its adaptability to diverse use cases. Consequently, a contemporary system architecture was developed, featuring modular components for data collection, storage, and visualization, leveraging Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Grafana technologies. This talk will address the usage and recent enhancement of the new monitoring components in the Green IT Cube at the GSI.

Speakers: Daniel Bruins (GSI), Gabriele Iannetti (GSI)

hepix_2024_monitoring_green_it_cube.pdf

27 Towards a DevSecOps approach in the CICD pipelines for the INFN Information System apps

The INFN Information System project was established in 2001 with the aim of computerizing and standardizing the administrative processes of the Institute and gradually moving towards dematerialization and digitization of documents. During these two decades the aim of the project has been accomplished by a series of web applications (what we call sysinfo apps) serving INFN researchers, technologists as well as administratives and human resource teams for activities like business trips, buying computing facilities, managing the recruitment process, accounting.

Those sysinfo apps are developed by a Development team and operated by a Platform team that manages also the underlying infrastructure as well as all the processes to enable the Development team in their activities. In the last four years both teams have been involved in the re-architecting of those apps towards the so-called microservices architecture. One of the main effort has been put in place to rethink the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CICD) pipelines towards a DevSecOps approach based on three guiding principles:

1. Platform and Development teams must agree on a contract (formalized both at project repository and CICD infrastructure levels) on how to develop, build, test, deliver and deploy software.
2. Platform team is the owner to the governance and security of the CICD pipelines.
3. Introduce shift left testing stages as early as possible in the software development life cycle.

In this presentation we will go through the implementation of the aforementioned guiding principles, describing how we leveraged the GitLab-CI pipeline profiles/templates concept to provide end-to-end CICD workflows applying to well defined project’s structures and languages. Moreover, focusing on the Continuous Deployment side, we will describe the GitOps approach, driven by the ArgoCD tool, to deploy microservices in our Kubernetes clusters.

Finally we will highlight how moving towards this DevSecOps approach allows us to keep a baseline of governance and security with the agile development while dealing with the challenge of migrating, at first, and evolving the INFN sysinfo apps in microservices architecture and container orchestration contexts.

Speaker: Giuseppe Misurelli (INFN)

devsecops-infn-sysinfo-apps-hepix-spring-2024.pdf

28 Streaming Science Globally: CERN’s Live Streaming Service

In the last 20 years, CERN’s Live Streaming service [1] has been a pivotal communication tool connecting CERN users and the High Energy Physics (HEP) community in real time. From its initial stages, employing Real Media technologies and Flash, to its present state, integrating cutting-edge technologies like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), the service has been instrumental in fostering global scientific collaboration.

In this presentation, we will provide a review of the service’s evolution, examining its architecture, employed technologies, and more. Our discussion will extend to the future of the service, addressing the challenges we anticipate.

Furthermore, we will provide detailed insight on the integration of the live streaming service with the transcoding and web lecture services. This integration enables users to watch already finished streams, improving their experience with cutting-edge features such as closed captions, composite views, and multi-quality videos.

[1] https://live.cern.ch

Speaker: Rene Fernandez Sanchez (CERN)

HEPIX_2024_cern_live_streaming_service.pdf

12:25 Lunch

Computing and batch services

Conveners: Matthias Jochen Schnepf, Max Fischer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Dr Michele Michelotto (Universita e INFN, Padova (IT))

29 Institute Computing Infrastructure with Dynamic Extension

The Institute for Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has access to several computing and storage resources. Besides the local resources such as worker nodes and storage, the ETP has access to the HPC cluster NEMO in Freiburg and to the Throughput Optimized Analysis System (TOpAS) cluster and Grid storage at the WLCG-Tier1 GridKa.
Hence, we use a pilot-like concept and the HTCondor flocking mechanism to make these additional resources transparent and dynamically available to users. This system provides users from ETP with up to several thousand CPU cores and several dozen data center GPUs in a homogeneous software environment.
This talk will show how to set up and use that computing infrastructure and its dynamic extensions. In addition to the admin point of view, the user point of view will also be discussed.

Speaker: Matthias Jochen Schnepf

HEPiX_2024_Matthias_Schnepf_KIT.pdf

30 News from the DESY clusters

We will give an overview and status, what over the past year is new and where we plan to go with our compute clusters. The migration to EL9 will be used for an overall update of Condor & Jupyter including a renovation & rewrite of the current configuration and some enhancements concluding from the past experience running the NAF.

Speaker: Christoph Beyer

desy_htc_systems_hepix_24.odp

desy_htc_systems_hepix_24.pdf

31 ARM Compute Testing and Provision at Glasgow’s Tier2

With the recent developments in ARM technology and ongoing efforts by experiments in the integration of it into their workflows, there is increasing interest in getting Tier2 sites to obtain ARM kit in future procurements for testing and potential pledging. Here we present tests conducted by Glasgow on a variety of next-generation CPU to strengthen this case of future heterogenous computing facilities, and to share our experiences creating an ARM farm and running ARM work for LHC experiments.

Speaker: Dwayne Spiteri (University of Glasgow)

HEPiXARMFarm.pdf

32 Computing for the KM3NeT research infrastructure

KM3NeT is a research infrastructure currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea.
It consists of two neutrino detectors: ARCA for studying astrophysical sources and ORCA for studying neutrino properties.
Currently 15% of the infrastructure is operational.
The output of the entire infrastructure will eventually amount to a data rate of 100 Gbps, and a data volume of 500 TB per year.
In view of the final infrastructure configuration, the KM3NeT collaboration is transitioning to the use of standards and services in the e-Infrastructure commons.
This contribution focuses on the data processing and data management that KM3NeT envisions in this context.

Speaker: Mieke Bouwhuis (NIKHEF)

hepix042024_km3net_mbouwhuis.pdf

15:10 Coffee

Computing and batch services

Conveners: Matthias Jochen Schnepf, Max Fischer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Dr Michele Michelotto (Universita e INFN, Padova (IT))

33 HEPiX Benchmarking Working Group Report

The adoption of HEPScore23 as replacement of HS06 in April 2023 marked a significant milestone for the WLCG community. After one year since that change, we conduct a thorough review of the experience, lessons learned, and areas for improvement. In addition, triggered by the community feedback and demand, the Benchmarking WG has started a new development effort to expand the Benchmark Suite with modules that can measure server utilisation metrics (load, frequency, I/O, power consumption) during the execution of the HEPScore benchmark. This activity has open a new potential of study that we will share in this report. Last but not least the work to include GPU workloads in the catalogue of available workloads will be presented.

Speaker: Domenico Giordano (CERN)

HEPiX_Paris_benchmarking_16_04_2024_giordano.pdf

34 Measuring Machine Metrics and Performance

The HEP Benchmark suite has been expanded beyond assessing only the CPU execution speed of a server via HEPScore23. In fact the suite incorporates metrics such as machine load, memory usage, memory swap, and notably, power consumption. In this report we detail the ongoing studies enabled by these new features.

Speaker: Domenico Giordano (CERN)

HEPiX_Paris_HS23_analysis_16_04_2024_giordano.pdf

IT facilities, business continuity and Green IT

Convener: Peter Gronbech (University of Oxford (GB))

35 Simulating Carbon Opportunity Cost at Grid Site

With the advent of new species of ARM architecture on the market, and increasing developments by Intel/AMD to match the power-savings by ARM, it can be difficult for Grid sites to decide which machines to target in future procurements. While cost is an important factor, sites are increasingly able to make at least part of their choices on sustainability grounds. Obtaining test machines and running HEPScore and power measurements is only part of the story when it comes to making these decisions, and one machine does not make a farm. It can also be difficult to both have an active site, and perform the large-scale tests ideally required to make the most informed decision on both the equipment you want to buy and the way you can run the site. We present work done by Glasgow to simulate our active site, with the aim of testing different ways of running the site, and the potential savings in carbon from running different types of machines in the future.

Speaker: Dwayne Spiteri (University of Glasgow)

HEPiXSimulation.pdf

36 Navigating the Intersection of Data Growth, Sustainability, and Innovation in Data Centers

In an era defined by the exponential rise of artificial intelligence and data analytics, the value of data is more valuable than ever, propelling the expansion of data centers to accommodate vast datasets. However, this growth comes with a sobering reality: the significant energy consumption of data centers, often rivaling that of entire nations. The need to create a sustainable and scalable storage infrastructure comes up against three critical forces: the unstoppable growth in data generation, the constraints of limited data center space and the scarcity of resources.

This presentation will explore a diverse array of solutions and innovations poised to address these pressing challenges:

• Carbon Emissions: Evaluating different Storage Media (Flash/Hard Drive/Tape) across their full lifecycle, emphasizing the importance of considering not only the usage phase but also the entire lifecycle.
• Areal Density Revolution: advancement in areal density thus the storage efficiency and capacity.
• Unveiling ADAPT + ADR: Advanced Distributed Allocation Protection Technology (Distributed Erasure Code) with Autonomous Drive Repair. Enables a transformative storage architecture offering unprecedented efficiency gains in power consumption, resource utilization, and e-waste reduction. Additionally, it reveals substantial additional savings in compute and networking resources while increasing data durability.
• SED as a Catalyst for Circular Economy: Exploring the pivotal role of Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) in fostering a circular hard drive economy, driving sustainability across the entire storage lifecycle.
• Seagate Circularity Program: Highlighting initiatives aimed at advancing circularity and minimizing the embodied carbon emissions underscoring the importance of holistic lifecycle considerations.
• MACH-2 Optimization: Introducing MACH-2, an innovative solution optimized for cost, power efficiency, and density, offering a compelling pathway towards more sustainable data storage infrastructure.

Join us as we navigate the complex terrain of data growth, sustainability imperatives, and technological innovation, forging a path towards a more sustainable and resilient future for data centers.

Speaker: Hugo Bergmann (Seagate Technology)

HEPiX Spring_Workshop_Paris 2024_Navigating the Intersection of Data Growth, Sustainability, and Innovation in Data Centers.pdf

Wednesday, 17 April

08:30 Registration

Storage and file systems

Conveners: Dr Andrew Pickford (Nikhef), Elvin Alin Sindrilaru (CERN)

37 Backing up ET EMR Seismic data

The Euregio Meuse-Rhine border region between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany is a potential site for the Einstein Telescope. In late October of 2023 Nikhef was asked to organise a backup and archiving of seismic survey data. This talk covers how the seismic data was then being shared and not backed up. The quick fix to backup the existing data; some custom python code being used as a medium term solution and longer term archiving.

Speaker: Dr Andrew Pickford (Nikhef)

et-seismic-data-storage.odp

et-seismic-data-storage.pdf

38 CERNBox: Community Distribution for Analysis Facilities

CERNBox is an innovative scientific collaboration platform, built using solely open-source components to meet the unique requirements of scientific workflows. Used at CERN for the last decade, the service satisfies the 35K users at CERN and seamlessly integrates with batch farms and Jupyter-based services.

Following the presentations given at the CS3 Workshop 2024[1] and CERN Storage Day[2], as well as the BoF session at the WLCG-HSF Workshop 2023[3], there has been a surge in interest from Tier 1 and Tier 2 Data Centres and other scientific institutions, all eager to deploy CERNBox within their own ecosystems. In this talk, we’ll delve into the core technology that powers CERNBox — Reva — and demonstrate how you can install your own CERNBox system with either EOS or CephFS as the storage backend. We conclude with remarks on the role of sync and share systems such as CERNBox in the Analysis Facilities landscape.

[1] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1332413/contributions/5740225/
[2] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1353101/contributions/5805537/
[3] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1230126/sessions/492063/#20230506

Speaker: Giuseppe Lo Presti (CERN)

GLoPresti-CERNBox.pdf

39 EPICS archiver infrastructure at ESS

ESS is getting ready for its next major milestone, which we call 'beam on dump,' where we will commission the full LINAC at the end of this year.
Although ESS is not yet completed, we have already built most of the IT infrastructure to support the control system for the accelerator, target, and neutron instruments.

System experts, operators, and beam physicists are already requesting to archive a lot of signals to understand, operate, and optimize their systems.
The control system being built with EPICS, we have deployed the open-source EPICS archiver appliance deployed on the technical network computing infrastructure to archive more than 700k PVs at 14 Hz and store up to 6TB of data per day.
We use CEPH for both block storage for those VMs and shared filesystem for the archiver appliance storage backend.

This presentation will walk you through the technical details of this implementation, some challenges we have faced, improvements we have made, as well as upcoming challenges

Speaker: Stephane Armanet (European Spallation Source)

ArchiverAppliance_ESS.pdf

40 The Evolution of Storage Media in Data Centers: Assessing the Future of Flash/SSD, Hard Drives, and Tape Storage

Data centers are at the forefront of managing vast amounts of data, relying on three primary storage mediums: Flash/SSD, Hard Drives, and Tape. This presentation deals with the special characteristics of the individual technologies and examines the question of whether the forthcoming advances will lead to one technology being displaced by the other. Central to our discussion is the examination of the distinct roles of these storage media and the potential for transformative technological shifts on the horizon.

Key topics to be explored include:

• A high-level overview and future outlook of Flash, Hard Drive, and Tape technologies.
• Understanding the differences, limitations and expected future development of the individual storage media.
• Drawing parallels from the consumer realm, where SSDs have replaced Hard Drives, prompts the question: What is the likelihood of similar transitions occurring within data center environments?

Join us as we navigate the complex landscape of storage media in data centers, offering insights into the dynamic interplay between technology, functionality, and the evolving needs of modern data management.

Speaker: Hugo Bergmann (Seagate Technology)

HEPiX Spring_Workshop_Paris 2024_The Role fo different Strorage Media in Data Centers.pdf

10:40 Group photo: tentative - timing subject to change according to weather conditions

10:45 Coffee

Network and security

Conveners: David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB)), Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

41 Grand Unified Token (GUT) profile working group

The Grand Unified Token (GUT)-profile working group is trying to create a single OAuth2 token profile to replace the main token profiles: SciTokens, WLCG and AARC. These token profiles are being used by infrastructures and collaborations such as LIGO, HTCondor, WLCG, EGI etc. for a "new" authentication method, replacing the current X.509-based authentication. All these profiles share various characteristics, such as being based on JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and designed for typical R&E distributed infrastructures. On the other hand there are important differences making unification non-trivial.
With such a diverse group of people, organisations and timezones, the unification design is not the only non-trivial task for the group. We will go over how we overcome these challenges, discussing the way we work, and go over some of the details for how we plan to achieve unification.

Speaker: Dr Mischa Sallé (NWO-I Nikhef)

gut-profile-salle.odp

gut-profile-salle.pdf

42 Collaborative operational security and Security Operations Centre deployment models

In previous HEPiX meetings we have presented on the strategic direction of the Security Operations Centre working group, focused on building reference designs for sites to deploy the capability to actively use threat intelligence with fine-grained network monitoring and other tools. This work continues in an environment where the cybersecurity risk faced by research and education, notably from ransomware attacks, remains persistent.

In this report we discuss recent developments in the working group, including a summary of our most recent hackathon, with a particular focus on potential methodologies for different types of facilities wishing to deploy this kind of capability.

Speaker: Dr David Crooks (UKRI STFC)

HEPiX_2024_SOC_WG_v2.pdf

43 Computer security update

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.

Speaker: Roman Sumailov (CERN)

HEPiX Spring 2024 redacted.pdf

HEPiX Spring 2024 redacted.pptx

12:25 Lunch

Network and security

Conveners: David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB)), Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

44 WLCG Network Monitoring and Analytics Updates

Given the importance of the network to WLCG, it is important to guarantee effective network usage and prompt detection and resolution of any network issues, including connection failures, congestion and traffic routing. This talk will focus on the status and plans for the joint WLCG and IRIS-HEP/OSG-LHC effort to operate a global perfSONAR deployment and develop associated network metric analytics. We will report on the changes and updates that have occurred since the last HEPiX meeting, including recent updates to alerting and alarming and proactive problem identification.

Speaker: Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

WLCG Network Monitoring and Analytics Updates

WLCG Network Monitoring and Analytics Updates.pdf

45 Research Networking Technical Working Group Status and Plans

The high-energy physics community, along with the WLCG sites and Research and Education (R&E) networks have been collaborating on network technology development, prototyping and implementation via the Research Networking Technical working group (RNTWG) since early 2020.

In this talk we’ll give an update on the Research Networking Technical working group activities, challenges and recent updates, emphasizing recent work related to DC24, Scitags and network use optimizations. We will also discuss near to long term plans for the group.

Speaker: Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

Research Networking Technical Working Group Status and Plans

Research Networking Technical Working Group Status and Plans.pdf

Basic and end-user IT services

Conveners: Mr Dennis van Dok (Nikhef), Jingyan Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN))

46 A Lightweight Analysis Facility for the DARWIN Collaboration

A robust computing infrastructure is essential for the success of scientific collaborations. However, smaller collaborations often lack the resources to establish and maintain such an infrastructure, resulting in a fragmented analysis environment with varying solutions for different members. This fragmentation can lead to inefficiencies, hinder reproducibility, and create collaboration challenges.

We present an analysis facility for the DARWIN collaboration, a new dark matter experiment, designed to be lightweight with minimal administrative overhead while providing a common entry point for all DARWIN collaboration members. The facility setup serves as a blueprint for other collaborations, that want to provide a common analysis facility for their members. Grid computing and storage resources are integrated into the facility, allowing for distributed computing and a common entry point for storage. The authentication and authorization infrastructure for all services is token-based, using an Indigo IAM instance.

This talk will discuss the architecture of the facility, its provided services, the DARWIN collaboration’s experience with it, and how it can serve as a sustainable blueprint for other collaborations.

Speaker: Sebastian Brommer (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE))

darwin_hepix.pdf

47 Micro-services for ATLAS muon alignment monitoring system

After a brief introduction on the Muon Alignment optical system and the dataflow for the optical lines, I will illustrate our infrastructure which is based on Micro-services in Java (mainly for the access to Oracle DB) and C++ (for the alignment algorithm itself) and deployed on a dedicated K8s cluster at CERN.

Speaker: Andrea Formica (Université Paris-Saclay (FR))

ATLAS-MuonAlign-HEPIX-pdf.pdf

15:10 Coffee

Computing and batch services

Conveners: Matthias Jochen Schnepf, Max Fischer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Dr Michele Michelotto (Universita e INFN, Padova (IT))

48 Exascale challenges

High-performance digital technology has entered a new era in recent years with the arrival of exascale. Anticipated by experts for more than ten years, exascale is supposed to respond to increasingly varied uses that go far beyond traditional numerical simulation. Data processing and AI are shaking up the HPC landscape and have implications at all levels, from hardware to software, at the application level and the role of the supercomputer, which is losing its central role in the data processing chain.
During this presentation, we will present the current and future supercomputing landscape and we will illustrate with a few examples the issues linked to exascale.

Speaker: Christophe Calvin

HEPiX2024-Exascale.pdf

HEPiX2024-Exascale.pdf

HEPiX2024-Exascale.pptx

Show us your toolbox

Conveners: Erik Mattias Wadenstein (University of Umeå (SE)), Peter van der Reest

49 Intro

HEPIX_ShowUsYourToolbox_Spring2024.pdf

50 Dennis' Toolbox

show-us-your-toolbox.html

51 Alex's Toolbox

HEPIX2024-toolbox.pdf

19:00 Social dinner

Thursday, 18 April

08:30 Registration

IT facilities, business continuity and Green IT

Convener: Peter Gronbech (University of Oxford (GB))

52 Carbon life cycle modelling of scientific computing

By modelling the life cycle emissions for a given unit of scientific computing under various scenarios of hardware replacement and computing facilities (including the emissions from the local power generation mix), we can find optimal computing hardware replacement cycles in order to minimize carbon emissions.

The majority of this work was presented at ISGC on March 28th: https://indico4.twgrid.org/event/33/contributions/1419/ but we intend to improve it based on the lively audience discussion the ISGC presentation generated.

Speaker: Erik Mattias Wadenstein (University of Umeå (SE))

20240418-lca.pdf

53 Carbon Costs in IRIS & UKRI NetZero DRI

As the UK’s journey towards NetZero accelerates, we need robust information to inform both strategic and operational decisions, from policy development and funding allocation to hardware procurement, code optimisation and job scheduling.

The UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure NetZero Scoping Project published its technical report and recommendations in August 2023 [1] and funded the IRISCAST project which took a learning-by-doing approach to conduct a proof of concept 24-hour carbon audit snapshot across a multi-site heterogeneous research infrastructure [2].

IRIS [3] has taken this a step further by funding a Carbon Mapping Project (IRIS-CMP) to develop practical carbon models to apportion carbon costs and to deliver an outline delivery roadmap. These models have been tested with real world data from both the QMUL GridPP T2 and from STFC SCD-Cloud.

We present our key IRISCAST and IRIS-CMP findings, recommendations, and lessons learned, in the context of the UKRI Net Zero DRI journey.

[1] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8199984
[2] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7692451
[3] https://www.iris.ac.uk/

Speaker: Dr Richard Alexander Owen (Queen Mary University of London)

HEPIX-2024-v1.pdf

54 Power and Performance Impact of Inlet temperature differences

At our site we have varied the datacenter inlet temperature between 23-25C while monitoring the effects on the total system power usage and temperature. In this talk i will give a overview of the results and findings of this. And how we collected all the relevant information, and how to visualize this in a useful format.

Speaker: Erik Kooistra

hepix-2024-kooistra.pdf

55 HEPiX Technology Watch Working Group Report

The Technology Watch Working Group, established in 2018 to take a close look at the evolution of the technology relevant to HEP computing, has resumed its activities after a long pause. In this first official report after such pause, we describe our goals, how the group is organized and the first results of our work.

Speaker: Dr Andrea Sciabà (CERN)

HEPiX-Techwatch.pdf

10:40 Coffee

Operating systems, clouds, virtualisation, grids

Conveners: Mr Dino Conciatore (CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre)), Michel Jouvin (Université Paris-Saclay (FR))

56 Streamlining solution for the hyper-converged cloud infrastructure at CSCS

This presentation provides a detailed overview of the hyper-converged cloud infrastructure implemented at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The main objective is to provide a detailed overview of the integration between Kubernetes (RKE2) and ArgoCD, with Rancher acting as a central tool for managing and deploying RKE2 clusters infrastructure-wide.

Rancher is used for direct deployment on MAAS-managed nodes, as well as HPC (High-Performance Computing) nodes designed for high-intensity workloads. In addition, Harvester orchestrates Kubernetes distributions for virtual clusters, improving flexibility and simplifying orchestration on the platform.

ArgoCD plays a key role in automating deployment processes and ensuring consistency between different environments, enabling continuous delivery. The integration of Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Rancher, Harvester and Terraform forms the basis of a hyper-converged, scalable and adaptable cloud infrastructure.

This case study provides information on the architecture, deployment workflows and operational benefits of this approach.

Speaker: Mr Dino Conciatore (CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre))

CSCS - Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure - HEPiX.pptx

57 Cloud Resilience Unleashed: A Dual-Site Approach for HL-LHC era

In preparation of the increasing computing needs of the HL-LHC, the IT department has built a new datacenter in Prevessin. These additional capacity will also enable IT services to prepare their Business Continuity and Disaster recovery plans.
With those two in mind, the cloud service has prepared a new deployment fully decoupled from the existing in Meyrin. This new setup allows users to operate with both datacentres seamlessly. The solution presented allows them to use resources on any of the sites even when there is a major outage in the other. This presentation will give an overview of the architecture, main differences and synchronization mechanisms between the deployments.

Speaker: Daniel Failing (CERN)

20240418-HePiX-Cloud-BCDR.pdf

58 Infrastructure as Code and DevOps approach for the SVOM mission

The Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) is a French-Chinese mission dedicated to the study of the most distant explosions of stars, the gamma-ray bursts. This talk will cover a brief overview of the whole mission infrastructure before focusing on the French Scientific Ground Segment (FSGS) infrastructure. The FSGS relies on a micro-services architecture with a full container based approach. The development of these micro-services are under the responsibility of several French and Chinese laboratories. Thus to ensure control and homogeneity among the different actors during the integration / delivery / deployment process we make an intensive use of the GitLab CI/CD by adopting a common git workflow and common job CI templates automatising the build, test, packages delivery and deployment steps. The micro-services orchestration is performed with Docker Swarms, we are currently migrating towards a Kubernetes cluster in high availability mode.
The FSGS uses 3 environments sites for the integration, pre-production stages and production. Each environment consists of an OpenStack project hosted at the IN2P3 Centre de Calculs and at IJCLab. The deployment of our infrastructure on each of these environments is fully automatised using a combination of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, namely Terraform and Ansible. The former for provisioning the immutable OpenStack cloud infrastructure (Network, VMs, Volumes, Security Groups) and the later for configuring the VMs. This IaC approach drastically improved the immutability and idempotency of our infrastructure with reasonable effort which is valuable when manpower is limited.

Speaker: Dr David Corre (CEA Irfu/Lilas)

HEPiX-FSGS-INFRA-CORRE.pdf

12:25 Lunch

Operating systems, clouds, virtualisation, grids

Conveners: Mr Dino Conciatore (CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre)), Michel Jouvin (Université Paris-Saclay (FR))

59 Wiring the Future: Open Virtual Networking and Beyond

The cloud service provides resources to the whole CERN community in two datacentres (Meyrin and Prevessin). The deployment of the new datacenter in Prevessin allowed us to reconsider all the design choices we made for Meyrin. In the networking area, we are increasing the flexibility and adding even more options to users by offering Software Defined Networking. In this talk, we will explain the inclusion of Open Virtual Networking (OVN) in the portfolio that allow users to have access to floating IPs, private networks, security groups at scale in the new Prevessin Datacentre.

Speaker: Daniel Failing (CERN)

20240418-HePiX-OVN-setup.pdf

60 Ready for Windows 11 in your endpoint device park?

Windows 10 is dead, long live Windows 11! Device compatibility, hardware replacement plans, strategies for upgrade campaigns, privacy are all discussed and illustated with examples based on 10000 CERN PCs. Generative AI (Copilot) is also coming to the OS layer. Are you ready?

Speaker: Sebastien Dellabella (CERN)

Hepix_2024.pdf

Hepix_2024.pptx

Network and security

Conveners: David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB)), Shawn Mc Kee (University of Michigan (US))

61 Update from the HEPiX IPv6 Working Group

The HEPiX IPv6 Working Group has been encouraging the deployment of IPv6 in WLCG for many years. At the last HEPiX meeting in Canada we reported that more than 97% of all LHC experiment Tier-2 storage services are IPv6-capable. Since then, we have turned our attention to compute services and have launched a GGUS ticket campaign for WLCG sites to deploy dual-stack computing elements and worker nodes. The working group also monitored the use of IPv6 during the recent WLCG Data Challenge DC24. As before we continue to identify uses of legacy IPv4 data transfers and strive to move these to IPv6.

This talk will present the activities of the working group since October 2023 and our future plans.

Speaker: David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB))

Kelsey-IPv6-18apr24.pdf

Deploying dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 connectivity to site computing services: WLCG GGUS ticket campaign for CPU services and worker nodes

Conveners: Dr Andrea Sciabà (CERN), David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB))

62 WLCG GGUS ticket campaign for dual-stack CPU services and worker nodes

Speaker: Dr Andrea Sciabà (CERN)

IPv6 compute deployment.pdf

IPv6 compute deployment.pptx

15:10 Coffee

Deploying dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 connectivity to site computing services

Conveners: Dr Andrea Sciabà (CERN), Bruno Heinrich Hoeft (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)), David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB))

63 Puppet module for Network Manager

Speaker: Alexandr Mikula (Czech Academy of Sciences (CZ))

networkmanager_and_dhcp_dns_script.pdf

64 IPv6 deployment on containers at RAL Tier1

Speaker: Martin Bly (STFC-RAL)

2024-04-15_19 HEPiX Spring Paris - IPv6 on RAL WNs.pdf

2024-04-15_19 HEPiX Spring Paris - IPv6 on RAL WNs.pptx

65 IPv6 deployment at KIT and removing IPv4

Speaker: Bruno Heinrich Hoeft (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE))

IPv4 to IPv6(-only) in the German Tier-1 Data Center of the CERN Large Hadron Collider v.0.1.pdf

IPv4 to IPv6(-only) in the German Tier-1 Data Center of the CERN Large Hadron Collider v.0.1.pptx

66 DIscussion and further information

Speaker: David Kelsey (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB))

Kelsey-info-18apr24.pdf

17:15 HEPiX Board meeting - by invitation only

Friday, 19 April

08:30 Registration

Basic and end-user IT services

Conveners: Mr Dennis van Dok (Nikhef), Jingyan Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN))

67 From VOMS to INDIGO-IAM

The end of life of CentOS 7 accelerates the transition from VOMS proxies to OAuth tokens as the means to convey authorization information on a Grid/Cloud infrastructure. As a consequence, the VOMS and VOMS-Admin services will be abandoned in favor of INDIGO-IAM (or equivalent products) for the management of VO membership and the issuance of proxies and tokens.
In this contribution we present the current state of affairs for the transition from VOMS to IAM, in terms of development, deployment and usage, with a peek into the future.

Speaker: Francesco Giacomini (INFN CNAF)

From_VOMS_to_INDIGO-IAM.pdf

68 Prototyping an Analysis Facility at CERN

In recent times, experiment analysis frameworks and physics data formats of the LHC experiments have been evolving in a direction that makes interactive analysis with short turnaround times much more feasible. In parallel, many sites have set up Analysis Facilities to provide users with tools and interfaces to computing and storage that are optimised for interactive analysis. At CERN we conducted detailed performance and scalability measurements using distributed analysis workloads to assess the readiness of the local computing and storage infrastructure, and more recently we launched a pilot for an analysis facility where real users will be able to run, in order to collect information about how CERN could provide such service. This prototype is based on well proven services, like SWAN, DASK, HTCondor and EOS. In this contribution we will show the results obtained so far.

Speaker: Dr Andrea Sciabà (CERN)

CAF.pdf

CAF.pptx

69 Re-designing the Remote Desktop Service: A solution for remote desktop access management at CERN

More than 2000 daily users use the remote desktop access service from outside CERN, supporting remote work capabilities in the organization.
To improve the operation of the service, a new self-service solution for remote desktop access was launched in 2023 that empower users to manage their devices set up for remote access. The solution includes parallelization, caching, and automated mechanisms of synchronization in order to enhance user experience and improve performance. This presentation will give an overview of the architecture, the mechanisms and the problems found and how they were solved to create a robust system for handling remote desktop connections in the organization.

Speaker: Petar Stojkovic

HEPiX_Petar_Stojkovic_RDG_CERN.pdf

70 The intelligent operation and maintenance system of the IHEP computing platform

Based on extensive experience in system maintenance and advanced artificial intelligence technology, we have designed the IHEP computing platform's intelligent operations and maintenance system. Its primary goal is to ensure optimal utilization and efficiency of computing resources.
This system automatically detects user jobs that cause anomalies in computing services and dynamically adjusts their available resources in real time.
Utilizing AI algorithms, it swiftly conducts fast, near real-time analysis of the file system's operational status and logs, identifying potential users and their process names that may be triggering anomalies.
After querying the computing node where the suspected abnormal job is located through the job scheduler, the system utilizes AI algorithms to conduct real-time analysis of the job to determine whether its behavior is causing excessive system load. Once confirmed, the system notifies the job scheduler and file system to limit the number of user job operations and the total I/O volume.
This system is employed for comprehensive monitoring and intelligent operations management of the computing platform. It dynamically adjusts the scale of available resources for users based on the overall situation of the computing platform, ensuring fair and efficient data processing for all users.

Speaker: Yaosong Cheng (Institute of High Energy Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences, IHEP)

The intelligent operation and maintenance system of the IHEP computing platform -chengys.pptx

10:40 Coffee

Basic and end-user IT services

Conveners: Mr Dennis van Dok (Nikhef), Jingyan Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN))

71 Packaging and system administration with Nix and NixOS

Nix is a tool for packaging software with a heavy focus on reproducibility. NixOS is a Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager.

This talk is a series of demonstrations of what Nix and NixOS can do for you. Depending on the time, here is what I'm going to show off:

• A presentation of the Nix model
• Its advantages in terms of supply-chain security
• Building minimal, reproducible Docker images
• Declarative Linux distribution with NixOS
• Remote administration of an offline NixOS system
• Rollbacks of a whole NixOS system
• Building NixOS Docker images
• Building VMs, ISOs, Containers
• Integration tests
• Cross-compilation and generating images for embedded systems

Speaker: Remi Nicole (CEA IRFU/DIS)

Demos and slides

slides.pdf

72 Secret management with HashiCorp Vault at DESY

An important aspect of IT security is the management, controlled sharing and storage of sensitive data such as passwords or API tokens. In this talk we present how HashiCorp Vault is used at DESY to address this challenge and how the system is integrated into workflows like certificate management and the existing IT infrastructure such as Puppet and GitLab. As secret management is a critical component for site operations, we describe how we aim for a fault tolerant and hardened setup.

Speaker: Kai Wiemann (DESY Hamburg)

2024-HEPiX-Secret-Management-with-Vault.pdf

Wrap-up

Convener: Helge Meinhard (CERN)

73 Wrap-up

Speaker: Helge Meinhard (CERN)

2024-04-19-HEPiX-WorkshopWrapUp.pdf