GENERAL INFORMATION ON LABS

CERN Computing Organizations

CERN has about 3000 CERN employees, 500 contractors 5000-6000 registered users and about 6000 people on site any given day. They have about 2000 Macs, 2000 PCs, 1200 UNIX workstation and 250 Xterms. There are three divisions at CERN providing computer services. Two of these divisions (ECP & AS) have some functions which have nothing to do with computing.

The CN division, with about 150 people, provides infrastructure support and is divided into 7 groups described in the CERN computer Newsletter 214, Sept - Dec 1993 p1. These groups are vertically oriented. Each group has developers and front line services/operations sections. The operations group is left with only 10 shift operators after the recent reorganization.

The Administrative Services Division provides document handling services, database applications (focusing on Oracle applications) and desktop computing support for Macs and PCs (they have about 13-14 people supporting Macs & PCs). We did not gather information on their ADP activities, this should be a focus of a future visit.

The ECP division has 130 people providing computing support for data readout, acquisition, experiment controls and event simulation, reconstruction and analysis, within the 130 there are about 30 who are focussing in "Progressive Techniques" to improve software production. This includes 10 people in software technology and 5 people in information systems (in particular WWW).

DESY Generalities

DESY appears to be very similar to SLAC in size, though we did not get estimates of the numbers of central support people involved. They appear to be following a policy like SLAC's viz a viz the interrelation between the central Computing Services and the experiments. That is, their CS department supports the central computing and networking. It is up to the experiments to develop and maintain their software environments.

It is clear to DESY that the vast majority of Physics computing is moving to UNIX because the vast majority of computing cycles are there (though the vasy majority of Physics users may not be there yet!) DESY is not yet saturating their SGI CPUs. For example, Zeus now has 18 CPUs but us usually using about 15 CPUs.

At the other end are the Macs, PCs, and personal UNIX systems. The question here is what can central services provide?

Where does VMS fit in? A DEC Alpha cpu is approximately equal to an SGI CPU. The Alpha VMS boxes with 4 processors are about 20 CERN units each. VMS is used by the Synchroton Radiation group, a mostly-DEC shop. And Zeus has its own VMS cluster for online work. DESY expects the casual IBM MVS users to go to VMS while the serious cycle IBM MVS users will go to UNIX. This probably differs from SLAC where we expect those casual users (who just need email, printing, etc.) to go to PCs and/or Macs.

DESY notes that their mainframe use has gone from 100% down to about 80%. I/O is still a big problem. They are using SHIFT from CERN, locally modified, with Ultranet to do tpread/tpwrite via MVS with MVS-ported daemons, although they feel that is still not fast enough. The IBM ES9000 is a bottleneck as the robot drive controller.

DESY runs about 500 X-terminals. Many are in offices and are configured to get service from the same machine that is also an NFS server for the home directory of the X-terminal user, this cutting back on NFS file activity and network overhead.

They also have 40-50 Suns used for CAD with IDEAS, technovision, etc. As well, they are using an Italian highly parallel SIMD system, the APE Quadrix Q16 with 2 banks of 128 nodes.