25 June 2009: Happy 7th Birthday, ScotGrid.
From humble beginnings.
Back in 2003, when ScotGrid celebrated its first birthday, it comprised of a 128-CPU farm in Glasgow and 5TB of storage provided by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. In stark contrast, when ScotGrid reached its 7th birthday on 25th June 2009, this fully-fledged Tier-2 facility boasted in excess of 3100 CPU "job-slots" and over 630TB of storage, spread across three sites at Durham, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The inexorable growth of ScotGrid is, in part, down to its capacity to consistently deliver compute facilities to researchers. Indeed, thus far in 2009, all three member sites have been independently measured as "available" at least 95% of the time. Over the last twelve months, ScotGrid has provided over 9 million CPU hours of processing time to the academic community and, in doing so, processed more than 4.3 million jobs, taking the total number of jobs processed during ScotGrid's lifetime to in excess of 6.3 million.
Supporting diverse user communities.
By far the heaviest users of ScotGrid are the LHC groups and, in particular, members of the ATLAS Virtual Organisation (VO). That said, the ScotGrid resources continue to be accessible to an ever-growing number of disciplines including Electrical Engineering, Chemistry and Bioinformatics. Most recently, researchers from the 'Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment' (MICE) and UK Quantum Chromodynamics group UKQCD were welcomed into the fold and a new "Optics" VO created. This is hosted at Glasgow and provides access to a commerical optical-engineering software package by Lumerical Solutions Inc.
The previous year has seen both Durham and Glasgow expand their facilities following the receipt of GridPP-allocated funds linked to past performance. Notably, the extension to the resources at Glasgow - housed in their bespoke machine room and exploiting the more energy efficient "cold-aisle containment" method of cooling - have made Glasgow into the second largest GridPP facility in terms of both raw processing power and available Grid storage.
The next twelve months.
Recent staff changes have seen members of Scotgrid deployed to Cern, to spread some of our expertise around, and new appointments at all three sites. These personnel work with GridPP, the NGS and the EGEE projects, placing Scotgrid firmly in a position of excellence within the UK and European Grid landscape.
ScotGrid system administrators are looking forward to the arrival of real LHC data after years of preparation and exercises based on simulated data. In addition, ScotGrid's demonstrated track record of consistently delivering high levels of service availability should be reflected in significant new investment in the infrastructure by GridPP.
Thus, the ScotGrid team embark upon the most exciting phase of the GridPP project as a highly motivated and integrated unit. They are excited to be involved in a scientific and computing project of unprecedented scale, whilst also keen to maintain ScotGrid's position at the forefront of UK Grid computing facilities.
