ATLAS Sim@P1 upgrades during long shutdown two

¹ University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
² Università e INFN, Bologna, Italy
³ CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
⁴ University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
⁵ Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
⁶ University of California Irvine, Irvine, United States of America

^* e-mail: berghaus@cern.ch
^** Copyright 2020 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS Collaboration CC-BY-4.0 licence.

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

The Simulation at Point1 (Sim@P1) project was built in 2013 to take advantage of the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition High Level Trigger (HLT) farm. The HLT farm provides around 100,000 cores, which are critical to ATLAS during data taking. When ATLAS is not recording data, such as the long shutdowns of the LHC, this large compute resource is used to generate and process simulation data for the experiment. At the beginning of the second long shutdown of the large hadron collider, the HLT farm including the Sim@P1 infrastructure was upgraded. Previous papers emphasised the need for simple, reliable, and efficient tools and assessed various options to quickly switch between data acquisition operation and offline processing. In this contribution, we describe the new mechanisms put in place for the opportunistic exploitation of the HLT farm for offline processing and give the results from the first months of operation.