Dear All
As you will know, the GridPP4+ hardware money has just been distributed to the Tier-2 institutes. The primary purpose of these funds is to ensure that the April 2016 Tier-2 pledge to WLCG is met by all four UK distributed Tier-2s. Each site should ensure that they are able to contribute the agreed/appropriate share of resources to their resources as part of their Tier-2.
However, the spend should also bare in mind the evolution in the Tier-2 infrastructure that is anticipated in GridPP5, since the hardware purchased now will last for 4-5 years. Briefly, this means that the large sites will need to continue to provide a balance of disk and cpu to match the requirements of the experiments they serve. On the other hand, the small sites are increasingly being used just for CPU-intensive work, with less requirement for disk. The funding for GridPP sites that are currently "mid-sized" will evolve as outlined in the GridPP5 proposal. All sites, of course, have the right to supplement GridPP funded effort with their own effort, should they wish and, therefore, should consider whether they foresee evolving into a CPU-dominated site or whether they expect to maintain a significant disk-capacity in order to run the more challenging analysis workloads. If sites want more advice, we suggest that they talk with the experiment that they serve (Roger Jones for ATLAS; David Colling for CMS; Andrew McNab for LHCb).
Given the time-scales involved, we do not think the exact balance of disk and cpu is critical for this procurement (i.e. we feel that GridPP will continue to make good use of both resources at most sites over the lifetime of the current procurement) but the bigger picture should be considered.
Regards, Dave.
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Prof. David Britton FInstP GridPP Project Leader
Rm 480, Kelvin Building Telephone: +44 141 330 5454
School of Physics and Astronomy Telefax: +44 141 330 5881
University of Glasgow EMail: [log in to unmask]
G12 8QQ, UK Web: www.gridpp.ac.uk
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