Speaker
Description
The GRID Computing Facility, VECC, has been operational for the last two decades. It comprises "Kolkata tier-2 for ALICE" and a "grid-peer tier-3 cluster" for the Indian collaborating Institutes. This is the only computing tier-2 in India for the ALICE CERN experiment under the WLCG umbrella. In this article we will describe how the GRID Computing Facility at VECC evolved and piece by piece developed since its inception during 2003-04. We will also highlight how we designed and implemented a cold aisle containment architecture by which Power Usage Effectiveness factor reduced from 2 to 1.47 and energy required for cooling the data centre reduced to half with the extreme ambient atmosphere.
Other than auxiliary infrastructure, it will be discussed that the entire facility is developed using all the open source software and GRID middleware. The facility is also made up to date with the evolution of the different computing and storage software stacks. Changing of underlining batch scheduler or upgrading to a new major release of the OS is a not trivial task as it is equivalent to building the computing cluster from the scratch. We will present how the facility is performing consistently with the present infrastructure and providing an uninterrupted computing support to the ALICE experiment with averaged more than 90% availability for the last 15 years. In India we are coordinating the GRID India project, therefore, in this article we will describe the future roadmap for the facility and also will explore the next generation heterogeneous resources. Other than managing the computing resource, We envisaged to perform workshops and schools in India towards High Energy Physics computing.