Setup and commissioning of a high-throughput analysis cluster

KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

^* e-mail: rene.caspart@kit.edu

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

Current and future end-user analyses and workflows in High Energy Physics demand the processing of growing amounts of data. This plays a major role when looking at the demands in the context of the High-Luminosity-LHC. In order to keep the processing time and turn-around cycles as low as possible analysis clusters optimized with respect to these demands can be used. Since hyper converged servers offer a good combination of compute power and local storage, they form the ideal basis for these clusters. In this contribution we report on the setup and commissioning of a dedicated analysis cluster setup at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. This cluster was designed for use cases demanding high data-throughput. Based on hyper converged servers this cluster offers 500 job slots and 1 PB of local storage. Combined with the 100 Gb network connection between the servers and a 200 Gb uplink to the Tier-1 storage, the cluster can sustain a data-throughput of 1 PB per day. In addition, the local storage provided by the hyper converged worker nodes can be used as cache space. This allows employing of caching approaches on the cluster, thereby enabling a more efficient usage of the disk space. In previous contributions this concept has been shown to lead to an expected speedup of 2 to 4 compared to conventional setups.