IN2P3/CNRS

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The field of particle physics generates colossal amounts of data requiring in-depth analysis. To handle these needs, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (IN2P3/CNRS) created a computing center in France to supply technology resources to support a dedicated community of researchers. For more than 20 years, the IN2P3 Computing Center has played a major role in providing processing power, expertise in data-intensive operations and high-bandwidth networking for the field’s most important scientific experiments.

The IN2P3 Computing Center is now embarking on its most ambitious particle-physics experiment— the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator that will be fully operational in 2008. It is a data-intensive instrument, expected to generate 40 million particle collisions per second. The vast amount of data to be generated from the LHC presented an IT challenge—how quickly can the data be processed?

No computing center existed to single-handedly absorb this amount of data. As a result, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (W-LCG) project was established. The W-LCG grid is a network of more than 100 computing centers located throughout Europe, America and Asia. These centers currently supply the computing power equivalent of 20,000 personal computers and are expected to grow to an equivalent of 70,000 processors in 2008. The IN2P3 Computing Center is one of eleven key centers in the grid's first level responsible for reception, long-term storage and redistribution of experimental data.

To support the grid project, the IN2P3 Computing Center issued an RFP for a solution to bolster its existing resources and supply 400 terabytes of usable storage resources. Key evaluation criteria included capacity, throughput, quality, and energy consumption and thermal characteristics. The IN2P3 Computing Center looked at server footprints for space planning and thermal dissipation rates to avoid further straining the air conditioning system and to maximize use of existing floor space. At the same time, IN2P3 Computing Center wanted to adopt an environmentally responsible attitude and do its best to minimize electricity consumption.

After a weighted analysis of the criteria and price from four vendors, the Sun hardware and software solution was found to be superior. The IN2P3 Computing Center liked the Solaris 10 Operating System’s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) feature because it does an excellent job of managing storage and disks, simplifies administration and detects and corrects data corruption. The next step was benchmark testing with some storage applications on both Linux and Solaris 10 OS. The Sun solution with Solaris 10 OS showed superior performance and better hardware support. The team also found the hardware easy to administer and felt Sun’s support with a dedicated systems engineer was excellent.

Based on these results, the IN2P3 Computing Center installed 46 Sun Fire X4500 servers running the Solaris 10 OS to provide processing power on the grid. Acquisition costs were under budget, which was important given that taxpayers fund the organization. Reliability and operational benefits have been important as well. The center found the Sun hardware to be very reliable and has not experienced a single instance of data loss.

With this initial success, IN2P3 Computing Center is adding an additional 1.6 petabytes of disk storage through 85 additional Sun Fire X4500 servers. Sun consultants are also helping IN2P3 increase the scalable capacity of its primary storage system by consolidating a portion of its tape environment from legacy Sun tape libraries to a Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular tape library with 30 Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives to handle large data files and 20 Sun StorageTek LTO4 tape drives for smaller files.

Expectations for this project and its ability to reveal unknown secrets of the universe are high. Undoubtedly, the world’s view of the universe will change in part due to this new computing power devoted to scientific exploration.