The GridKa Tier-1 Computing Center within the ALICE Grid Framework

Abstract

The GridKa computing center, hosted by Steinbuch Centre for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) in Germany, is serving as the largest Tier-1 center used by the ALICE collaboration at the LHC. In 2013, GridKa provides 30k HEPSPEC06, 2.7 PB of disk space, and 5.25 PB of tape storage to ALICE. The 10Gbit/s network connections from GridKa to CERN, several Tier-1 centers and the general purpose network are used by ALICE intensively. In 2012 a total amount of ~1 PB was transferred to and from GridKa. As Grid framework, AliEn (ALICE Environment) is being used to access the resources, and various monitoring tools including the MonALISA (MONitoring Agent using a Large Integrated Services Architecture) are always running to alert in case of any problem. GridKa on-call engineers provide 24/7 support to guarantee minimal loss of availability of computing and storage resources in case of hardware or software problems. We introduce the GridKa Tier-1 center from the viewpoint of ALICE services.