25 June 2005: ScotGrid's 3rd birthday

June 25th marks the third anniversary of ScotGrid deployment. After three years, the system has provided more than 1.7 million CPU hours and 130,000 completed jobs.

The third year has been significant for ScotGrid. This year, full integration with the LCG-2 Grid, the basic Grid system for the EU Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe (EGEE) project, and the Grid for UK Particle Physics (GridPP) testbed was achieved to deliver the full resources of the cluster to the worldwide grid whilst maintaining local scheduling policy at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Durham.

The user service for 12 Groups (ATLAS, BaBar, Bioinformatics, CDF, Device Modelling, Grid Data Management, Information Retrieval, LHCb, Medipix, MICE, UKQCD and ZEUS) services approximately 100 individual users. Six major Grid Virtual Organisations are also supported: ATLAS, Alice, LHCb, CMS, Sixt and Zeus. We are also planning support for more VOs as they become Grid-aware.

Significant new deployments are ongoing to support worldwide grid computing efforts. Additional disk space is being deployed at Glasgow and Edinburgh through the dCache Storage Resource Management system originally developed at DESY and Fermilab.

Service Challenges

ScotGrid at Edinburgh is leading our involvement in the third LCG Service Challenge, starting in July 2005. This is a period of sustained operation and testing of the computing and networking infrastructure underlying the LCG Grid. Glasgow, Durham and the other UK Tier 2 sites will be involved later in the year.

Future Planning

The next phase of ScotGrid is now secure through funding of new equipment at Edinburgh and Glasgow via SRIF3, to be used as the basis of the Scottish Grid Service. We anticipate that we will be able to deliver significantly upgraded and expanded computing and data storage resources to our grid and local users as the new investment is rolled out.

ScotGrid

ScotGrid is a three-site Tier-2 centre consists of an IBM 200 CPU Monte Carlo production facility run by the Glasgow PPE group and an IBM 24TB datastore and associated high-performance server run by Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre and PPE group. A Sun 100 CPU farm is currently being connected, based at Durham University Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology.

The ScotGrid project was funded by SHEFC (now SFC) for the analysis of data primarily from the ATLAS and LHCb experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and from other experiments. It is now providing IBM solutions for Grid Computing in Particle Physics, Bioinformatics as well as Grid Data Management, medical imaging and device modelling simulations.