INFN Tier-1 Testbed Facility

Abstract

INFN-CNAF, located in Bologna, is the Information Technology Center of National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). In the framework of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, INFN-CNAF is one of the eleven worldwide Tier-1 centers to store and reprocessing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data. The Italian Tier-1 provides the resources of storage (i.e., disk space for short term needs and tapes for long term needs) and computing power that are needed for data processing and analysis to the LHC scientific community. Furthermore, INFN Tier-1 houses computing resources for other particle physics experiments, like CDF at Fermilab, SuperB at Frascati, as well as for astro particle and spatial physics experiments. The computing center is a very complex infrastructure, the hardaware layer include the network, storage and farming area, while the software layer includes open source and proprietary software. Software updating and new hardware adding can unexpectedly deteriorate the production activity of the center: therefore a testbed facility has been set up in order to reproduce and certify the various layers of the Tier-1. In this article we describe the testbed and the checks performed.