Spoilt’s blog

50,000 processor cores and counting.. about half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the LHC which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons. The Computer Centre will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors. The grid is linked to the centre through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the centre owns 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of hard disks and 30 petabytes of tapes by the end of the year. Check out the photos, enjoy!

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CPU capacity required at CERN =)

The four detectors of the LHC project.

CERN Computer Centre. PC Farms: Inexpensive mass market components (running Scientific Linux CERN - recompiled RHEL).

For more posters & photos, check out the CERN section @ my photo Gallery.

If you’re reading this.. the world hasn’t ended (yet!)

I get the feeling that everyone is quite surprised and extremely relieved that both beams have successfully circulated the LHC today. The party has really started in the central control room. Its important that both beams have successfully circulated because it means that there are no major technical issues with it. The LHC has truly been born!

Today’s a big day for the universe as we know it: Scientists will attempt to re-create the aftermath of the Big Bang in the world’s most ambitious scientific experiment and it starts in 3 minutes!!

Click here for live webcast!

at last..

Click here if you’re new to Grids.
Click here to learn the basics (how to get a Grid Certificate, how to join a virtual organisation and so on).
a) First you need to install OpenAFS click here for more info
b) $ source /afs/cern.ch/project/gd/LCG-share/sl4/etc/profile.d/grid_env.sh
This will work out-of-the-box. You may want to add the above line to your .bashrc file. There’s no need to install anything LCG-specific on your fedora because you will be using CERN’s libraries, python, glite and etc.
for example:

[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ uname -a
Linux prodigy 2.6.25.10-86.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jul 7 20:23:46 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ which voms-proxy-init
/usr/bin/which: no voms-proxy-init in (/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib64/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/spoilt/bin)
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ source /afs/cern.ch/project/gd/LCG-share/sl4/etc/profile.d/grid_env.sh
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ which voms-proxy-init
/afs/cern.ch/project/gd/LCG-share/3.1.14-0/glite/bin/voms-proxy-init
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ voms-proxy-init
Enter GRID pass phrase:
Your identity: /DC=ch/DC=cern/OU=Organic Units/OU=Users/CN=ekaravak/CN=xxxxxx/CN=Edward Karavakis
Creating proxy ………………………………………………. Done
Your proxy is valid until Thu Jul 17 11:35:26 2008


Now you’re ready to run your echo “Hello World” to the Grid

- 16/11/08 Update: OpenAFS 1.4.8 has been released.

Here’s a quick guide on how to get OpenAFS working on Fedora 9. OpenAFS is an open source implementation of the Andrew distributed file system (AFS).

[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/openafs.repo
and add the following:
[openafs]
name=OpenAFS 1.4.8 for Fedora $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://dl.openafs.org/dl/openafs/1.4.8/fedora-$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ sudo yum install openafs dkms-openafs openafs-client
Reboot your computer and start the openafs-client service
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig –level 35 openafs-client on
and you’re ready to explore the Andrew distributed File System!
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ cd /afs
[spoilt@prodigy afs]$ ls
1ts.org it.kth.se
acm-csuf.org itp.tugraz.at
acm.uiuc.edu jpl.nasa.gov
ams.cern.ch kfki.hu
andrew.cmu.edu kloe.infn.it
anl.gov kth.se
asu.edu laroia.net
athena.mit.edu lcp.nrl.navy.mil
…the list is quite big!
[spoilt@prodigy ~]$ cd /afs/cern.ch/user/e/ekaravak
[spoilt@prodigy ekaravak]$ source /afs/cern.ch/project/gd/LCG-share/sl4/etc/profile.d/grid_env.sh
enjoy…

Some photos from CERN…(at last!)

yes, you guessed right, part of my project is to make a black hole to eat the whole planet.

The CERN Computer Centre…

The ATLAS experiment!

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Well well well..I just wanted to tell you that in a few hours I’ll be boarding on the airplane and flying to Geneva, Switzerland. I am very excited to be able to participate in such a revolutionary global collaboration (obviously I mean CERN and the LHC experiments :P). I’ll be working there from 27th of May till 8th of June on the Dashboard project.

The Dashboard project aims to provide a single entry point to the monitoring data collected from the distributed computing systems of the LHC virtual organisation. The Dashboard collects information from multiple sources and it covers various activities of the LHC experiments like job processing, data management, transfer tests, monitoring of the reconstruction at Tier-0, or monitoring of site efficiency. The Dashboard is currently working on different Grid flavours (OSG, LCG, gLite) and it is deployed for the four LHC experiments ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. I’m so excited to see the whole infrastructure of CERN..

More to follow soon…

There are only five days left before going to CERN, Geneva… I’m so excited… this place is the holy grail of technology!!! Can’t wait… help! :p