Computing and Grid
CDF-UK Resources
CDF is expected to store over 1 Petabyte of data to tape in RunII. The UK CDF institutions have been awarded a 1.8m grant from the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF) for computing equipment located in the UK and at the experimental site. About 4/5 of this award is being spent on high-speed high-volume disk storage with high bandwidth access to local CPUs while the remainder is allocated to lease a dedicated network link to Fermilab to improve interactive access to computing resources at the experiment and to provide internet video conferencing capabilities. A schematic of the infrastructure request is shown below.
To date, a 10TB RAID has been provided to CDF and is being used to hold the express data stream. A similar sized contribution will be made to the experiment next year.
The JIF grant has supplied each of the four UK institutions on CDF (Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Oxford) with an IBM 8-way SMP server connected via a Fibre Channel link to its own 1TB RAID. A similar system, twice as large, has also been provided to RAL for use by all the UK groups. Next year, the remainder of the grant will be used to approximately double the computing and storage capacity. UK institutes also have access to about 30 PCs at both Fermilab and the home institutions.
We intend to place the JIF computing and data-storage facilities on the UK GRID so that the CDF data and our combined computing power are seamlessly available, initially to all the UK groups, and later for access by the CDF collaboration. A further goal is to make our disk storage and CPU available to the whole particle physics community so that the CDF prototype GRID grows into, forms, and becomes part of the GRID for Particle Physics.
MAP Simulation Facility
The MAP facility at Liverpool is specifically designed for large scale simulation, and currently consists of 300 Linux boxes, each with local disk storage. Due to a recent SRIF award, MAP will be upgraded in December 2001 to 1500 processors. MAP has recently been GRID-enabled to allow remote job submission from authorized users, with job outputs returned to remote machines. MAP will satisfy all of the UK CDF simulation requirements.