Preparing CERN Tier-0 data centres for LHC Run 3

Since 2013 CERN’s local data centre combined with a colocation infrastructure at the Wigner data centre in Budapest [1] have been hosting the compute and storage capacity for Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) [2] Tier-0. In this paper we will describe how we try to optimize and improve the operation of our local data centre to meet the anticipated increment of the physics compute and storage requirements for Run 3, taking into account two important changes on the way: the end of the co-location contract with Wigner in 2019 and the loan of 2 out of 6 prefabricated compute modules being commissioned by the LHCb experiment [3] for their online computing farm

Experience of public procurement of Open Compute servers

The Open Compute Project. OCP (http://www.opencompute.org/). was launched by Facebook in 2011 with the objective of building efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. The technologies are released as open hardware. with the goal to develop servers and data centres following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects. In 2013 CERN acquired a few OCP servers in order to compare performance and power consumption with standard hardware. The conclusions were that there are sufficient savings to motivate an attempt to procure a large scale installation. One objective is to evaluate if the OCP market is sufficiently mature and broad enough to meet the constraints of a public procurement. This paper summarizes this procurement. which started in September 2014 and involved the Request for information (RFI) to qualify bidders and Request for Tender (RFT)

Report of the heavy flavors working group

After a brief discussion of the statistics available to the four LEP experiments at the time of writing and an overview of B-event characteristics, the authors consider in particular the theory, practice and potential pitfalls of neural networks, a new approach to B tagging which attracted a great deal of interest. They then consider some of the QCD aspects of heavy flavour physics. Finally there is a brief discussion of the prospects for heavy flavour physics at HERA