OpenStack boosts Tier 0 for LHC Run 2

The award-winning OpenStack cloud at CERN will grow from 75,000 to over 100,000 processing cores for LHC Run 2

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The LHC experiments use grid computing to distribute data analysis tasks to computer centres around the world. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) – a distributed computing infrastructure arranged in tiers, Tier 0 being managed directly from CERN – gives a community of over 8000 physicists near real-time access to LHC data. The OpenStack open source project provides on-demand cloud computing software used at Tier 0.

Earlier this month, a team in the CERN IT department was awarded the first OpenStack SuperUser award in recognition of the software’s use at CERN, along with their contributions back to the OpenStack community.

"CERN has one of the largest OpenStack deployments, featuring more than 75,000 processing cores on 3500 servers at data centres in Geneva and Budapest," says Tim Bell of the CERN IT department, who accepted the award along with his team. "At CERN, the OpenStack service provides the computing infrastructure powering most of the grid services. With the growth of capacity required for Run 2, we will be expanding this to over 100,000 cores in time for the start of data taking."

This extra capacity is needed to handle the expected increase in data coming from the LHC experiments when the accelerator moves to higher energy running in 2015. Bell says that it will be an integral part of the Tier-0 operations.

At CERN, OpenStack allows users to request virtual machines and storage in a few minutes through a web portal or from applications. These virtual machines are used for many different purposes, from production IT services, compute and analysis applications and personal test and development servers. Users can choose from a mixture of operating systems such as Windows and Linux or even upload their own operating system images.

"Much of the batch capacity at CERN is delivered using the 3800 virtual machines running on top of OpenStack along with the servers needed to run the experiment Tier-0 workflows," says Bell. "These resources are all integrated into the WLCG accounting systems so that appropriate quotas for the experiments are allocated to the OpenStack projects."

Bell says that the SuperUser award is a recognition of the efforts by the whole OpenStack team at CERN who have contributed to the code base over the past two years, implementing new features as well as bug fixes, and taken part in testing and improved documentation.

Bring on Run 2.