The University of Edinburgh

1. The ScotGrid consortium was created in 2001 as part of a £800,000 SHEFC grant to provide a regional computing centre with Grid capabilities for Scotland. This was primarily for high energy physics experiments, specifically those at the CERN Large Hadron Collider but with the flexibility to support other disciplines such as bioinformatics and earth sciences. ScotGrid has grown from two initial universities (Edinburgh and Glasgow) to include a third (Durham) with computing and data storage resources distributed between three sites, each of which bring specialist knowledge and experience. We have a growing user community in Scotland and as part of the wider UK eScience Programme. The University of Glasgow The University of Glasgow collaborates in the ScotGrid projects with developers and researchers in the Departments of Physics and Computational Science and a significant number of users in the bioinformatics community. Glasgow is a computationally biased site with a range of equipment including a SHEFC funded Beowulf cluster, a CDF cluster, a bioinformatics cluster and a test system. The SHEFC funded Beowulf cluster was purchased as part of the first tranche of ScotGrid funding and comprises 59 dual processor nodes with 2GB of memory per node, five management nodes and a quad processor system with 5TB of disk. This 5TB system was originally based at Edinburgh but was later moved to Glasgow to improve system performance. The system is backed up using a tape library. The CDF equipment is a 10 node Dell machine based on Intel Xeon processors with 1.5GB of memory per node and 7.5TB of disk. The bioinformatics system was purchased with the eDIKT group from the National eScience Centre. This has 28 IBM blades with dual 2.4GHz Xeon processors and 1.5GB memory and six IBM xSeries 335 dual 2.4GHz with 1.5GM memory. The test system comprises four 233MHz Pentium II systems which are used for development and software testing. Above: An IBM x440 as used by Edinburgh to manage the RAID array.Right: An IBM FAStT900 RAID array – Edinburgh’s contains over 300 hard drives. Below: The UltraGrid system in use at Edinburgh for the BaBar experiment. The University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh's involvement with ScotGrid is primarily focused on the data storage and management issues. Researchers are involved from the School of Physics, the School of Informatics, the National eScience Centre and EPCC. The researchers at Edinburgh have worked closely with other developers at CERN and RAL to test and roll out the European DataGrid Storage Element software and are working with the LHC Computing Grid on data storage issues. The SHEFC funded equipment housed at Edinburgh includes 3 front end nodes which provide access to an 8 processor machine which manages a 24TB RAID array for data storage. Edinburgh is also home to the BaBar UltraGrid system which is a quad SUN SPARC / Solaris system with fast Myricon networking. A further four front end systems have been provided with GridPP2 funding. The Edinburgh Particle Physics Experiments group is currently in the process of integrating the ScotGrid data storage equipment with a new 150TB storage area network (SAN) that the University has recently acquired. Of this, 10TB has been allocated to ScotGrid. Left: The 128 processor clusterhoused at Glasgow Below: The 80 processor cluster housed at Durham The University of Durham The University of Durham has joined ScotGrid adding a 40 node system, based on dual-2.2GHz Pentium 4 processors with 2GB of memory and 30GB of local disk, to our capabilities. With the addition of Durham we have shown ScotGrids' ability to add new sites and resources without degrading service for our existing users. We have also gained new communities in the form of theoretical particle and astrophysics groups. The Future ScotGrid is now moving into its second (production) phase, having solved many of the issues which it faced initially and having provided over 1, 000, 000 hours of processing time to various experiments. We now have a reliable and well understood system which we can use to assist many fields of research. We intend to expand our user community to include increasing numbers of researchers at the host universities and elsewhere. ScotGrid is looking forward to the start of the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2007 to demonstrate the usefulness of regional computing centres. Above: The logical layout of ScotGrid Above: Behind the scenes with the Glasgow cluster