The Computer Centre gets ready for the LHC

The Computer Centre is currently undergoing renovation to increase the reliability of the electricity supply to its computer equipment and to meet the LHC data acquisition challenge.

It's all go in Building 513! The Computer Centre is being renovated to meet the future requirements of the LHC. Following the refurbishment of the basement in 2002, the teams coordinated by the ST (Technical Support) and IT (Information Technology) Divisions have now turned their attention to the ground floor. Last autumn, half of the computer equipment was moved to the basement to allow the renovation of a first section of the main room on the ground floor.
These latest removals mark the end of the toings and froings of the STK tape robots, whose role is to store the experiments' data. In 2001, half of these robots - i.e. five of them - were taken to Building B613, specially designed to house them (see Bulletin 51/2001). Then, last spring, the other five robots were taken down to the basement. Before the renovation work began, IT Division also carried out a thorough spring cleaning of the main room of Building 513. "Over the last few weeks, fifteen kilometres of no longer needed cables have been removed from the cavity floor for recycling", explains Tim Whibley of IT Division's Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (FIO) group.

The renovation of the first half of this room will be completed in May 2004. Once the PCs have been moved, the work on the second half will then begin. By the end of 2005, the Computer Centre will be finally ready to receive the equipment for handling the first data from the LHC experiments.
The Computer Centre manages the e-mail servers and the Nice (Network Integrated Computing Environment) system, which comprises some 6000 PCs, as well as the data generated by the current experiments. In 2007, it will also be required to take on the enormous volume of data produced by the LHC and its computer grid. In order to increase the computing power, 300 to 400 new computers are arriving every year. In 2007, the centre will have a computer population of between 6000 and 10000 PCs, representing a total power of 2.5 MW.
With this increase in the number of computers, electricity consumption will also increase. "The addition of new electric cubicles and busbars will allow us to increase the electricity supply", explains Tony Cass, head of the FIO group. To meet the new requirements, the existing electricity sub-station will also be replaced by a new one. "The existing sub-station supplies only 500 kW of computer equipment, which represents only a fifth of our requirements", explains Anne Funken, the project leader from ST Division.
The other aim is to "make the building's electricity supply sufficiently reliable to keep all the computing tools running 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year", adds Tony Cass. In the event of a power cut, a tenth of the computers - representing 250 kW - will have to be capable of managing the data from the accelerators and the running of the e-mail servers. "The incident that occurred on 22 April 2003 should not happen again", says Tony Cass. That day, the entire CERN computer system was paralysed following a power cut in Building 513. In the future, a stand-by power supply should avoid a reoccurrence of this kind of situation. Finally, the increase in the number of computers will also require an upgrade of the air-conditioning system.
ST Division is responsible for designing and putting together the technical infrastructure needed for the Computer Centre, namely civil engineering, electricity, air-conditioning, fire detection and access control, while the computer population is managed by IT Division, which is responsible for moving and taking delivery of them without any interruption of service. Once its renovation has been completed at the end of 2005, the 30-year old Building 513 should be good for another 30 years!