Extension of the INFN Tier-1 on a HPC system

¹ INFN Sezione di Pisa, L.go B. Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa (ITALY)
² INFN CNAF, Viale Carlo Berti Pichat, 6/2, 40127 Bologna (ITALY)
³ INFN Sezione di Perugia, Via Alessandro Pascoli 23c, 06123 Perugia (ITALY)
⁴ INFN Sezione di Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44122 Ferrara (ITALY)
⁵ INFN Sezione di Roma1, P.le Aldo Moro 2, 00185 Roma (ITALY)
⁶ CERN, Esplanade des Particules 1, P.O. Box 1211, Geneva 23 (SWITZERLAND)
⁷ INFN Sezione di Bologna, Viale Carlo Berti Pichat 6, 40127 Bologna (ITALY)
⁸ INFN Sezione di Napoli, Via Cintia, 80126 Napoli (ITALY)
⁹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Viale Berti Pichat 6/2, 40127 Bologna (ITALY)

¹ https://home.infn.it/en/

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

The INFN Tier-1 located at CNAF in Bologna (Italy) is a center of the WLCG e-Infrastructure, supporting the 4 major LHC collaborations and more than 30 other INFN-related experiments.

After multiple tests towards elastic expansion of CNAF compute power via Cloud resources (provided by Azure, Aruba and in the framework of the HNSciCloud project), and building on the experience gained with the production quality extension of the Tier-1 farm on remote owned sites, the CNAF team, in collaboration with experts from the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments, has been working to put in production a solution of an integrated HTC+HPC system with the PRACE CINECA center, located nearby Bologna. Such extension will be implemented on the Marconi A2 partition, equipped with Intel Knights Landing (KNL) processors. A number of technical challenges were faced and solved in order to successfully run on low RAM nodes, as well as to overcome the closed environment (network, access, software distribution, … ) that HPC systems deploy with respect to standard GRID sites. We show preliminary results from a large scale integration effort, using resources secured via the successful PRACE grant N. 2018194658, for 30 million KNL core hours.