Speaker
Dr
Michael Ernst
(DESY)
Description
The IT Group at DESY is involved in a variety of projects ranging from Analysis of
High Energy Physics Data at the HERA Collider and Synchrotron Radiation facilities to
cutting edge computer science experiments focused on grid computing. In support of
these activities members of the IT group have developed and deployed a local
computational facility which comprises many service nodes, computational clusters and
large scale disk and tape storage services. The resources contribute collectively or
individually to a variety of production and development activities such as the main
analysis center for the presently running HERA experiments, a German Tier2 center for
the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and research on grid
computing for the EGEE and D-Grid projects.
Installing and operating a great variety of services required to run a sizable Tier2
center as a federated facility is a major challenge. The anticipated computing and
storage capacity for the start of LHC data taking is O(2000)kSI2K and O(700)TB disk.
Given local constraints and particular expertise at the sites the DESY IT Group and
the Physics Group at RWTH Aachen, both having their facilities in two distinct
locations that are about 500km apart, are in the process of building such a center
for CMS. The anticipated conceptual design is based on a network-centric architecture
allowing the installation and operation of selected services where they fit most
optimally the boundary conditions as they do exist at either institution. While the
group at RWTH is having their focus on LHC physics, interfacing to data processing at
a fairly high level, a considerable amount of expertise on processing of petabyte
scale physics data in a highly distributed environment exists at DESY.
In this paper we describe the architecture, the distribution of the services, the
anticipated operational model and finally the advantages and disadvantages of using
such a scheme to manage a large scale federated facility.
Primary author
Dr
Michael Ernst
(DESY)
Co-authors
Dr
Andreas Gellrich
(DESY)
Dr
Knut Woller
(DESY)
Mr
Martin Gasthuber
(DESY)
Dr
Patrick Fuhrmann
(DESY)
Dr
Volker Guelzow
(DESY)
