On 18 Sep 2013, at 18:22, David Colling <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Alessandra,
> 
> Yes they are indeeedee. I only know of bits and pieces in the LHC world but do know, for example, that our T2K colleagues make extensive use of them. The Imperial T2K people code and debug locally and then run on the RAL resources. This is proving so successful that we are considering adding a bigger node - perhaps to the GridPP  cloud so that others could use it via OpenStack. These are at the *ideas* stage at the moment, but if we did would there be any takers or would we have just thrown away a chunk of money (or rather given it to T2K as I am sure that they would use them)?
> 
> I guess that the question is what should GridPP be doing about this? I don't see it as our place to fund development in the individual experiments but should we be acting as a conduit for best practise? Organising Goofit tutorials? Interacting with EGI as Stephen suggests? What else? Is there a focus that we can develop with very little money?

I think a key thing we can do is keep the sites involved in the directions the experiments are going in to exploit these new arrangements of hardware.

So in the many-core case, let's say the cores to memory ratio increases dramatically over the coming years and experiments respond with multithreaded/multiprocess jobs (the LHC experiments are all already working on this at some level, with demonstrations working.) Sites need to know this kind of thing so they know what to buy. Equally sites often have closer relations with vendors than experiments, so we could help feed back the practical realities of what is more or less affordable. GridPP could help co-ordinate providing testbed resources for this kind of thing. Of course, some of the sites are already doing this as part of their experiment involvements, and some of that kind of thing is reported at the new technical meetings.

GridPP is in a very good position to do more of this, as (a) one of the largest collaborations of sites (b) well-organised by comparison with a lot of other places, and (c) with links into the experiments. This may even involve bringing in UK people from the experiments' computing so we have contacts within the relevant development teams themselves. This could be an opportunity to get things tried out at sites as we go along, and much quicker than more formal routes via WLCG etc.

Cheers

 Andrew

> I think that these are questions for next Tuesday rather than Friday but I will add a specific discussion to the discussion agenda for this.
> 
> Best,
> david
> 
> On 18/09/13 14:41, Alessandra Forti wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> multicore should become a reality at the end of LS1. We should
>> definitely have it as an activity.
>> 
>> cheers
>> alessandra
>> 
>> On 18/09/2013 14:12, David Colling wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I am just drawing up an agenda and is it worth having an item on FTS3
>>> (from Andrew L.)?
>>> 
>>> Also the many and multicore activity. Is somebody able to describe
>>> what has been happening in these two areas? Is this something that we
>>> want to have as an activity in GridPP5?
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> david
>> 
>>