Edinburgh Site Report

1 July 2004

Steve Thorn

Particle Physics Experiments Group

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 2

Computing structure

• Tiered approach:– Physics and Astronomy – Computing Support Team (CST)– PPE Research Group – system manager (physman)

• Works quite well, but• don’t manage everything so have had some problems

e.g. videoconferencing

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 3

Computing Support Team

• 5 FTEs• Provide common platform based on RHEL WS 3.0 or

WinXP• Responsible for

– Most department wide computing infrastructure:– network, DHCP, NIS, DNS, email, firewall, tape backups,

updates

• No support for other OS• Strict security regulations – firewall issues

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 4

physman

• ~0.3 FTE per research group (RA, PhD student)• First point of contact for all computing issues within

group• Responsible for:

– purchasing – group specific software and customization – OpenAFS,

CERNLIB, etc– security implication of group specific software/customization– printer queue management with CUPS– laptops– intrusion detection monitoring – Tripwire

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 5

Network

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 6

Network

• Physics and Astronomy: 100 Mbit/s– ‘Physics’ network for supported WinXP and RHEL– ‘Private’ network for anything else, laptops and visitors

• SRIF funded network: 1 Gbit/s fibre parallel to EdLAN used by ScotGrid

• Wireless in selected areas (University wide)

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 7

PPE hardware

• Sun Enterprise 250 Server, Solaris 8, + 0.5 TB RAID serving home directories, Web server

• 23 desktops– 85 % RHEL WS 3.0– 15 % Windows, MS Office, VRVS, lab– Almost all Dell– 0-6 years old

• 5 laptops – mainly dual boot Windows/Linux• Babar compute farm: 4 * Sun Ultra 80, 1 * Ultra 5,

currently offline

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 8

ScotGrid

• Storage bias– IBM xSeries 440, 8 * Xeon 1.9 GHz, 32 GB RAM– 2 * FastT900 Storage Server, total 22 TB RAID 5

• Front ends– 2 * IBM xSeries 205, P4 1.8 GHz, 256 MB RAM– 1 * IBM xSeries 340, 2 * PIII 1.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM

• LTO Ultrium Tape Library• Need worker node(s)

• Currently installing LCG2 – Test Zone in next 1-2 weeks

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 9

RHEL experience• Subscription under Red Hat’s Education Programme

– Base package (Proxy server, students) £1500 p.a.– RHEL WS @ £5 p.a. per FTE, ~100 FTEs– A few AS licences with phone support – < £4000 p.a. for Physics and Astronomy– Coverage: unlimited use for staff and students on University or privately

owned hardware• In use since April 2004• Updates via up2date and Proxy server, nightly cron job• Good value for money

– Reduced OS upgrades– Updates come out quickly– Web based status monitoring an unexpected extra– Removal of some useful packages e.g. Pine– Red Hat not clear on exactly how unlimited licence works – we have a

nominal upper limit of 200 seats

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 10

Hack reports

• No Linux based intrusions in last two years• Blaster worm before installation of firewall (Jan 2004)

1 July 2004 Steve Thorn - UK HEP System Managers Meeting Slide 11

Future plans

• Phase out Sun/Solaris• Purchase Linux server and unify PPE group storage• Move ScotGrid to dedicated computing facility (out of

town)• There will be more and more ScotGrid hardware…