A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our followers, users and co-workers from Scotgrid Glasgow.
Keeping to a Physics theme, as always.

See you all in 2013.

2012; A Grid Odyessy

We haven't published on the blog since September this year which is a bit remiss of us.
There are many reasons for this. Primarily we have been working through the final back log of the DRI grant until October. The expansion of the Glasgow site to 4000 cores, terra scale networking and changes to the disk farm have not been simple. Once the long standing issues with the internal data network were resolved with the upgrade to the Extreme Networks equipment, additional issues around the placement of data by DPM became evident. This was not a non trivial task to investigate. Stuart and Sam are in the process of developing a software patch for allowing a more sensible placement of data files within the cluster.

In addition to this work, we are currently considering software and hardware changes to our data storage architecture in the new year. More of this in January.

Again this year Glasgow has been plagued with infrastructure issues which have caused several major issues to the site's operation. We are now in a position where there is a major upgrade programme underway to deliver a more robust power, fire suppression and air conditioning system throughout the computer rooms.

While these combined issues have caused a large number of issues the Glasgow site saw a return to 100 % availability and reliability metrics for November on the WLCG accounting earlier this week.
Hopefully, this is how we will continue through the Christmas period and into 2013.

As the end of winter is upon us with the winter solstice being just over 15 days away and Christmas following shortly behind it we would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for all of those at Scotgrid.

All hands to the pumps, oh wait, that is Glycol

Unfortunately on Friday the Air Con fairy visited Glasgow and due to a faulty pressure valve decided to sprinkle some magic in one of our plant rooms by dumping liquid coolant onto the floor. We took emergency action and closed down the cluster as the heat being generated in 141 was going above 30 degrees centigrade. The faulty equipment and associated devices were replaced. Thankfully, there hasn't been any damage to the equipment and we will be coming out of downtime and going back into production shortly.

The Higgs appears

This year we haven't been great at keeping up with blog posts but there are many reasons behind this. We have installed a new network, additional cores taking us up to 4000 available job slots and have upgraded the server infrastructure throughout  GU Scotgrid's cluster. Also, we have fallen foul of infrastructure issues and have had problems with the old and replacement Air Con systems. Slowly, we are extracting ourselves from these issues and  recently Professor David Britton gave a lecture on the Grids role in the announcement made in July of this year at CERN during this years Turing Festival. A surprise appearance at the event was Professor Higgs himself.

Professors David Britton (left) and Professor Peter Higgs

Also presenting at the event were Professors Tejinder Singh Virdee and John Ellis of Imperial College and Dr Ben Segal from CERN. The event was one of the kickstart activites for the Turing Festival and enabled the public and academics to get a better over view of what has been involved in getting the experiments this far.

Scotgrid Calling

It has been a while since we last updated the blog which is generally a sign of being busy. Unfortunately we have encountered several infrastructure issues recently which needed to be repaired. Predominantly these revolved around the air conditioning units on the roof of the Kelvin Building. This work was completed a few weeks ago but as one thing has been fixed another issue identified itself in the form of a failing Air Handling Unit in 141. The knock on effect of this is that we can't take full advantage of the cluster servers located in the room and the overall cluster is running at two thirds capacity presently.

While, these events are less than optimal it has allowed us to plan the next set of cluster upgrades which will introduced another 256 job slots into the cluster and due to the new resilient network fabric we have developed the deployment of these services is no longer limited to one room supporting 10 gig interfaces.

Other developments also include the re-introduction of an independent control network and a new WAN testing platform Perfsonar. We will blog about this seperately shortly.

CHEP Update

As we are into the 4th Day of CHEP a quick overview of the activities of Scotgrid, GridPP and the conference as a whole is now in order.

We have presented our posters and have generated interest in Storage, Job failures, Network Security and some of the work we have conducted with IPv6. Several potential collaborations with other sites and developers have resulted from these presentations. Andy and Wahid had several successful talks and there was a high volume of interest on the work being discussed.

From a GridPP perspective Chris Walker's poster on using Lustre for low cost petascale storage also generated a large volume of interest. Talks given by other members of the collaboration were equally well received.

The conference itself has covered the multiple developments within the field over the last 12 - 18 months with presentations investigating a variety of topics including federations for data, the future of CPUs/GPU, ultra high speed networking and common software architectures for the experiments.

The variety of techniques being deployed and approaches taken to Grid centric problems are always of interest.

Scotgrid in the Big Apple for CHEP

We are attending the WLCG and CHEP in New York this week. There will be regular updating of the blog with details of the talks and papers we are attending.

Stockholm LHCONE Meeting

Kristall in the Sergels Torg Stockholm

We were in attendance at the LHCONE  meeting at KTH in Stockholm last week. The purpose of this collaboration is to investigate the efficient use of networks globally for LHC research. As usual it was an excellent meeting where the technical mechanisms for current and future network deployments were discussed and considered.

The agenda can be found here. Some of the highlights of the meeting included an excellent presentation by Erwin Laure on the Swedish and Scandinavian Super Computing and Grid computing infrastructure, Joe Mambretti's presentation on the GLORIAD global research network, Mike O'Connor's discussion on the technical configurations required to avoid asymmetric routing issues between the LHCONE and the current production networks and  Domenico Vicinanza's presentation on Perfsonar MDM.

In addition to these presentations technical discussions surrounding various technologies surrounding bandwidth reservation, ultra high speed networking and  Open Flow technologies were held. As these discussions develop through the network architecture groups we will keep you up to date. 


Also, the weather in Stockholm was exceptional and the KTH Campus is worth a visit for its architecture alone. I would like to thank our hosts and all the other attendees for making this such an enjoyable and informative couple of days.

 KTH Campus Stockholm