28 October 2013 to 1 November 2013
University Of Michigan
America/Detroit timezone

Experience with dynamically provisioned worker nodes at the RAL Tier 1

1 Nov 2013, 10:55
25m
340 West Hall (University Of Michigan)

340 West Hall

University Of Michigan

Oral presentation Grid, Cloud & Virtualisation Grids, clouds, virtualisation

Speaker

Andrew David Lahiff (STFC - Science & Technology Facilities Council (GB))

Description

Even with the growing interest in cloud computing, grid-based submission to traditional batch systems is still the primary way for the experiments to run jobs at WLCG sites. Integrating a batch system with virtualised worker nodes on a cloud potentially offers sites many benefits. At RAL we have recently investigated making opportunistic use of a private StratusLab cloud when it has unused resources and there are idle jobs in the batch system. Our ability to do this is greatly simplified due to our migration of the batch system to HTCondor, currently in progress. Here we describe the work that has been done so far, present preliminary results and discuss some of the issues raised by the testing, including virtualisation overheads, fairshares, virtual machine lifetimes, and monitoring requirements for dynamic environments.

Primary author

Andrew David Lahiff (STFC - Science & Technology Facilities Council (GB))

Co-authors

Ian Collier (UK Tier1 Centre) Orlin Alexandrov (STFC - Science & Technology Facilities Council (GB))

Presentation materials