Migrating the INFN-CNAF datacenter to the Bologna Tecnopolo: A status update

Abstract

The INFN Tier1 data center is currently located in the premises of the Physics Department of the University of Bologna, where CNAF is also located. During 2023 it will be moved to the “Tecnopolo”, the new facility for research, innovation, and technological development in the same city area; the same location is also hosting Leonardo, the pre-exascale supercomputing machine managed by CINECA, co-financed as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, 4th ranked in the top500 November 2022 list. The construction of the new CNAF data center consists of two phases, corresponding to the computing requirements of LHC: Phase 1 involves an IT power of 3 MW, and Phase 2, starting from 2025, involves an IT power up to 10 MW. The new data center is designed to cope with the computing requirements of the data taking of the HL-LHC experiments, in the time spanning from 2026 to 2040 and will provide, at the same time, computing services for several other INFN experiments and projects, not only belonging to the HEP domain. The co-location with Leonardo opens wider possibilities to integrate HTC and HPC resources and the new CNAF data center will be tightly coupled with it, allowing access from a single entry point to resources located at CNAF and provided by the supercomputer. Data access from both infrastructures will be transparent to users. In this presentation we describe the new data center design, providing a status update on the migration, and we focus on the Leonardo integration showing the results of the preliminary tests to access it from the CNAF access points.