Edinburgh%20Site%20Report

1
Edinburgh Site Report

• 1 July 2004
• Steve Thorn
• Particle Physics Experiments Group

2
Computing structure

• Tiered approach
• Physics and Astronomy Computing Support Team
  (CST)
• PPE Research Group system manager (physman)
• Works quite well, but
• dont manage everything so have had some problems
  e.g. videoconferencing

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

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

5
Network
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)

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

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

9
RHEL experience

• Subscription under Red Hats Education Programme
• Base package (Proxy server, students) 1500 p.a.
• RHEL WS _at_ 5 p.a. per FTE, 100 FTEs
• A few AS licences with phone support
• lt 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

10
Hack reports

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

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