Speaker
Description
As CERN prepares its central IT Data Centres for the High‑Luminosity LHC era (Run 4), the compute and storage infrastructure operated by CERN IT must evolve to meet significantly higher demands in throughput, capacity, and efficiency while remaining within strict constraints on budget, power consumption, and operational simplicity. With LS3 expected to begin in July 2026 and the HL‑LHC start currently aligned with mid‑2030, procurement planning for the CERN IT facilities must carefully balance long hardware lead times with fast‑moving market trends and rapid changes in CPU, GPU, memory and storage technologies.
This presentation will describe the upcoming procurement activities specifically for servers and storage managed by the CERN IT department, without covering experiment‑side facilities or attempting to represent the full WLCG perspective. Building on the principles used successfully in Run 3 (maximizing performance‑per‑CHF and per‑watt for compute, and capacity‑per‑CHF and per‑watt for storage) we will outline how these guidelines translate into concrete technical specifications, benchmarking requirements, energy‑efficiency considerations, reliability and serviceability requirements, and expected tendering cycles for Run 4.
In addition to presenting CERN IT’s current planning and the challenges we face, particularly in light of unstable component markets, this talk explicitly aims to foster an open discussion within the HEPiX and WLCG community. The goal is to explore how we, as a distributed ecosystem of data centres, might collectively adapt procurement strategies, operational models, and technology choices to better cope with such market instabilities. While CERN IT will share its current outlook, this session encourages input from other sites and stakeholders, recognising that community experience and alignment will be essential as we move toward the HL‑LHC era.
| Desired slot length | 15 |
|---|---|
| Speaker release | No |