Analysis Facility Pilot (Weekly Discussion )

Friday 11 Apr 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

513/1-024 (CERN)

Useful information and links:

e-mail list: cern-analysis-facility@cern.ch

Overall description and useful information

Mattermost Channel

Workbook

Minutes

1 Discussion with the NAF team from DESY

Starting with the standard set of questions we will discuss experiences gained in the area of providing resources for analysis.

Overview:
• Main services offered by the AF.
• Scale: amount resources and number of users.
• What triggered the deployment of the AF?
- Were users demanding Jupyter/Dask/Scale-out etc.?
• What has been the adoption by users?
- Is the usage increasing over time?
• Do you only support interactive analysis?
- If not, how does non-interactive analysis look like?
• Can the AF be used via a terminal/batch?
Metrics
• How do you measure how many (active) users are using the facility?
• What other user metrics do you measure?
- Real-time or historical time series?
• What KPI do you consider to define success from the point of view of AF operations?
• How do you monitor storage (XCache or other) usage and performance?
• Number of users?
Software distribution
• How are the client software libraries made available to the users
• To what extent, and how, can users customize their software stack (e.g. versions of Coffea and dependencies)?
• To what extent do you provide support of the client software side? E.g. having one or few software distributions that are "guaranteed" to work?

For sites that provided interactive use via interfaces like Jupyter, the question on the transition from the interactive use to batch use also came up frequently.

Speaker: Markus Schulz (CERN)