Abstract
The INFN Tier-1 located at CNAF in Bologna (Italy) is a center of the WLCG e-Infrastructure, supporting the 4 major LHC collaborations and more than 30 other INFN-related experiments. After multiple tests towards elastic expansion of CNAF compute power via Cloud resources (provided by Azure, Aruba and in the framework of the HNSciCloud project), and building on the experience gained with the production quality extension of the Tier-1 farm on remote owned sites, the CNAF team, in collaboration with experts from the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments, has been working to put in production a solution of an integrated HTC+HPC system with the PRACE CINECA center, located nearby Bologna. Such extension will be implemented on the Marconi A2 partition, equipped with Intel Knights Landing (KNL) processors. A number of technical challenges were faced and solved in order to successfully run on low RAM nodes, as well as to overcome the closed environment (network, access, software distribution, … ) that HPC systems deploy with respect to standard GRID sites. We show preliminary results from a large scale integration effort, using resources secured via the successful PRACE grant N. 2018194658, for 30 million KNL core hours.
Highlights
Italian physicists have historically been major players in the design, construction and operations of the LHC detectors, via the funding of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN1)
We show preliminary results from a large scale integration effort, using resources secured via the successful PRACE grant N. 2018194658, for 30 million Knights Landing (KNL) core hours
Since 2018, a significant fraction (45%) of the CPU power has physically been deployed at CINECA, but it is logically seen as part of CNAF farm with the help of a dedicated connection realized via a pair of Infinera DCI, currently limited at 400 Gbps
Summary
Italian physicists have historically been major players in the design, construction and operations of the LHC detectors, via the funding of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN1). Supports LHC distributed computing infrastructure via 10 WLCG[1] facilities, with a Tier-1 site in Bologna (Italy), at INFN-CNAF; currently, it provides about 10% of the WLCG Tier-1 total resources, with the exact share depending on the experiment. Alternative directions are explored in order to overcome the resource problem; one attractive requires the utilization of the High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities worldwide, expected to be at the Exascale (1 Exaflops = 1018 floating point operations per second) in the same time period.
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