About
The Scientific Computing Unit engages in the development and implementation of data-intensive distributed computing technologies, such as Grid and Cloud computing, and highly parallel processing techniques, providing infrastructure and support to the particle physics, astroparticle and observational cosmology projects of the department. In particular, the Unit operates two data centers of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), a distributed computing infrastructure built to meet the challenge of data processing on an unprecedented scale in the LHC. A Tier-2 center for the CMS experiment is located in the CIEMAT site in Madrid and a Tier-1 center is managed in Barcelona at PIC. PIC has emerged as a reference center for scientific computing techniques in a enviroment of massive datasets that allows to support a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Services Offered
CIEMAT operates and maintains since 2003 a second level regional data processing centre of the WLCG distributed computing infrastructure, a Tier-2 centre, for the CMS experiment at LHC.
A Tier-2 site has the main functionality of hosting the data analysis, supporting users and analysis groups, importing and storing the data and providing the hardware and software resources for an efficient analysis. It also has to provide resources for calibration tasks and for the production of simulated data. The agreement, following the Spanish share to CMS, is to provide resources equivalent to 5% of the total CMS needs for these centres.
CIEMAT Tier-2 resources
– 2 Petabytes of Disk storage
– 2500 CPU cores of compute capacity
– 2 x 10 Gbps WAN connectivity
– Swtiched Ethernet LAN connectivity with 10Gbps links (aggregated bandwidth ~1Tbps)