Virtualization, clouds and IaaS at CERN

Abstract

The four detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are delivering about 22 Petabytes of data per year. CERN-IT's computer center is part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), serving as the Tier-0 facility for processing these data. Trying to keep track with the increasing demands, CERN-IT is facing a number of challenges: more capacity needs to be provided without matching person-power; the additional capacity will be provided in a remote (more than 1000 km away from CERN) location; a more flexible and dynamic approach to meet user requests is needed; the existing scheme does not provide optimum efficiency. In order to address these challenges, CERN-IT has launched the Agile Infrastructure project. It includes better-adapted means of managing the fabric and full exploitation of virtualization and provisioning of services via internal clouds and IaaS based on the OpenStack toolkit.