Computing Topics

Intended to list the internal task list and make sure that the priorities are agreed.

Necessary - ASAP

• Memory review/purchase -- How much memory the HT capable nodes need. Aim for 3 GB per core. 2 would be ok too.
• 2014 Deployment plan -- power / placement
  • Get quotes for Nodes/Disks. Compare 6378 with 6382 SE
  • Before finalizing it would be nice to have
• Monitoring review - test SMS alerts and fine-tune priorities of alerts and where they go
• PhEDEx migration to better hardware - will support thousands of parallel transfers instead of hundreds.

Necessary - Long term

• Write CMSSW benchmark suite that could be ran by Condor/CRAB jobs. Compare performance of whole-node to 1 core.
  • Bonus feature - Have CouchDB centralizing jobs outputs. We would know how much EV/s each CPU could do. Automated systems such as WMAgent could use this information.
• Not so long term -- Figure out the HEP Cluster usage.

Enhancement

• Start a Cloud site with the $500 Google Cloud promotion. Needs quite some testing. Setting up a minimalistic site would be fast though. Might have problems in the Middleware.
• CRAB submitting to the T2 through HTCondor CE.
• T3 Storage - CEPH commissioning, start testing with WN storage.
• Try registering T3-Higgs as T3_US_Caltech and mimic the T2 activities. Could observe how a "CEPH site" would behave.
  • In principle no mistery, if file reading by jobs and GridFTP works. Already tested ROOT access. Works better than Hadoop (support merging natively)
• CEPH Validation checklist
  • Works with all ROOT operations - opening, merging and updating file -- doesn't work in HDFS, works in CEPH
  • Running CMSSW jobs -- test stage-out
  • GridFTP transfers
  • Checksum calculation for standard Linux tools
  • Test Caching policy and functionality -- Cache node disks have to serve as a RAID0.
  • Partial replication -- less than factor of 2 usable space.