Oxford University Particle Physics Site Report

11th Oct 2005

Pete Gronbech

Systems Manager and South Grid Technical Co-ordinator Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 1

Physics Department Computing Services

 Physics department restructuring. Reduced staff involved in system management by one. Still trying to fill another post.  E-Mail hubs  A lot of work done to simplify the system and reduce manpower requirements. Haven’t had much effort available for anti-spam. Increased use of the Exchange Servers.

 Windows Terminal Servers  Still a popular service. More use of remote access to user’s own desktops (XP only)  Web / Database  A lot of work around supporting administration and teaching.

  Exchange Servers  Increased size of information store disks from 73-300GB. One major problem with failure of a disk but was solved by reloading overnight.

Windows Front End server – WINFE     Access to windows file system via SCP, SFTP or web browser Access to exchange server (web and outlook) Access to address lists (LDAP) for email, telephone VPN service 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 2

Windows Status

    Systems are now almost entirely Windows XP or 2000 on clients and Windows Server 2003 for services.

More machines brought into centrally managed domain.

More automation of updates, vulnerability scans etc.

More laptops to support

Grant year 98/99 99/00 00/01 01/02 02/03 03/04 04/05 Windows Desktops Installed 25 34 22 78 49 50 45 Minimum Spec P2/350 P3/450 P3/733 P3/1000 P4/2.0

P4/2.6

P4/3.0

Maximum Spec P3/450 P3/650 P3/866 P4/1800 P4/2.6

P4/3.0

P4/3.2

Laptops (individual) Laptops (pool) 1 3 5 6+8 9 11 2 2 3 2 2 3

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Software Licensing

      Cost increasing each year Have continued NAG deal (libraries only) New deal for Intel compilers run through OSC group Also deals for Labview, Mathematica, Maple, IDL System management tools, software for imaging, backup, anti-spyware etc.

(MS OS’s and Office covered by Campus select agreement) 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 4

Network

     Gigabit connection to campus operational since July 2005. Several technical problems with the link delayed this by over half a year.

Gigabit firewall installed. Purchased commercial unit to minimise manpower required for development and maintenance. Juniper ISG 1000 running netscreen.

Firewall also supports NAT and VPN services which is allowing us to consolidate and simplify the network services.

Moving to the firewall NAT has solved a number of problems we were having previously, including unreliability of videoconferencing connections.

Physics-wide wireless network. Installed in DWB public rooms, Martin Wood and Theory. Will install same in AOPP. New firewall provides routing and security for this network. 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 5

Network Access

Super Janet 4 2.4Gb/s with Super Janet 4 OUCS Firewall 10Gb/s depts 1Gb/s Backbone Edge Router 100Mb/s depts 10Gb/s Campus Backbone Router 10Gb/s Physics Firewall 1Gb/s Physics Backbone Router 1Gb/s Backbone Edge Router 100Mb/s 100Mb/s depts depts

Network Security

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Constantly under threat from vulnerability scans, worms and viruses. We are attacking the problem in several ways

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Boundary Firewall’s ( but these don’t solve the problem entirely as people bring infections in on laptops.) – new firewall

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Keeping operating systems patched and properly configured windows update server new Antivirus on all systems – Spyware detection – managed systems More use of Sophos but some problems anti-spyware software running on all centrally Segmentation of the network into trusted and un-trusted sections – new firewall Strategy

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Centrally manage as many machines as possible to ensure they are uptodate and secure – most windows machines moved into domain Use Network Address Translation (NAT) service to separate centrally managed and `un-trusted` systems into different networks – new firewall plus new Virtual LANs Continue to lock-down systems by invoking network policies. The client firewall in Windows XP –SP2 is very useful for excluding network based attacks – centralised client firewall policies

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Particle Physics Linux

        Aim to provide general purpose Linux based system for code development and testing and other Linux based applications.

New Unix Admin (Rosario Esposito) has joined us, so we now have more effort to put into improving this system.

New main server installed (ppslgen) running Scientific Linux (SL3) File server upgraded to SL3 and 6TB disk array added.

Two dual processor worker nodes reclaimed from Atlas Barrel assembly and connected as SL3 worker nodes.

RH7.3 worker nodes being migrated to SL3 ppslgen and worker nodes form a mosix cluster which we hope will provide a more scalable interactive service. These also support conventional batch queues.

Some performance problems with gnome and SL3 from exceed. Evaluating alternative (NX) for exceed which doesn’t exhibit this problem (also has better integrated ssl).

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PP Linux Batch Farm Migration to Scientific Linux

Red Hat 7.3

2 * 800MHz P3 2 * 450MHz P3 2 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 pplx3 pplx2 pplxwn04 pplxwn03 pplxwn02 Addition of New 6TB SATA RAID Array 6TB 4TB 2 * 2.4GHz P4 pplxwn01 1.1TB

2 * 2.2GHz P4 pplxgen 11th Oct 2005 pplxfs1 2 * 1GHz P3 File Server pplxwn11 pplxwn10 pplxwn09 pplxwn08 pplxwn07 pplxwn06 ppslgen

Scientific Linux 3

2 * 2.8GHz P4 2 * 2.8GHz P4 1 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 2 * 2.4GHz P4 8 * 700MHz P3 pplxwn05 9

Southgrid Member Institutions

 Oxford  RAL PPD  Cambridge  Birmingham  Bristol  HP-Bristol  Warwick 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 10

Stability, Throughput and Involvement

 Pete Gronbech has taken on the role of technical coordinator for South Grid tier-2 centre.

 The last Quarter has been a good stable period for SouthGrid  Addition of Bristol PP  All sites upgraded to LCG-2_6_0  Large involvement in Biomed DC 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 11

Status at RAL PPD

 SL3 cluster on 2.6.0  CPUs: 11 2.4 GHz, 33 2.8GHz

 100% Dedicated to LCG  0.7 TB Storage  100% Dedicated to LCG  Configured 6.4TB of IDE RAID disks for use by dcache  5 systems to be used for preprodution testbed 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 12

Status at Cambridge

     Currently LCG 2.6.0 on SL3 CPUs: 42 2.8GHz (Extra Nodes only 2/10 any good)  100% Dedicated to LCG 2 TB Storage (have 3 but only 2 available)  100% Dedicated to LCG Condor Batch System Lack of Condor support from LCG teams 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 13

Status at Birmingham

 Currently SL3 with LCG 2_6_0  CPUs: 24 2.0GHz Xenon (+48 local nodes which could in principle be used but…)  100% LCG  1.8TB Classic se  100% LCG.  Babar Farm moving to SL3 and Bristol integrated but not yet on LCG 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 14

Status at Oxford

      Currently LCG 2.6.0 on SL304 All 74 cpus’s running since ~June 20th CPUs: 80 2.8 GHz  100% LCG 1.5 TB Storage – second 1.5TB will be brought on line as DPM or dcache.

 100% LCG.

Heavy use by Biomed during their DC Plan to give local users access 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 15

Oxford Tier 2 GridPP Cluster Summer 2005

LHCb ATLAS Biomed Data Challenge, Supported a non LHC EGEE VO For about 4 weeks.

Start of August 2005 ZEUS 11th Oct 2005 Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 16

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Oxford Computer Room

       Modern processors take a lot of power and generate a lot of heat.

We’ve had many problems with air conditioning units and a power trip.

Need new, properly designed and constructed computer room to deal with increasing requirements.

Local work on the design and the Design Office has checked the cooling and air flow.

Plan is to use two of the old target rooms on level 1, one for physics one for the new Oxford Supercomputer (800 nodes).

Requirements call for power and cooling between of 0.5 and 1MW SRIF funding has been secured but this now means its all in the hands of the University’s estates. Now unlikely to be ready before next summer.

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Flow simulation showing temperature of air.

Centre of the Racks 11th Oct 2005 Rows of racks arranged to form hot and cold aisles.

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“Oxford Physics Level 1 Computer Room” Last Year you saw the space we could use.

There are now 5 racks of computers located here. Bad News: No Air Conditioning Room also used as a store Conversion of Room is taking time…But Tier 2 Rack 2, Clarendon, Oxford grid development, and Ex RAL CDF IBM 8 way to build joint room for Physics and OSC Hepix SLAC - Oxford Site Report 24

Future

        Intrusion detection system for increased network security Complete migration of desktops to XP-SP2 and MS Office 2003.

Improve support for laptops – still more difficult to manage than desktops.

Once migration of central service to SL is complete, we will be developing a Linux desktop clone.

Investigating how best to integrate Mac OS X with existing infrastructure.

Scale up ppslgen in line with demand. Money has been set aside for more worker nodes and a further 12+ TB of storage.

More worker nodes for the tier-2 service Look to use university services where appropriate. Perhaps the new supercomputer ?

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