Groups and Activities Report 2017
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Groups and Activities Report 2017 ISBN 978-92-9083-491-5 This report is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 2 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 CONTENTS GROUPS REPORTS 2017 Collaborations, Devices & Applications (CDA) Group ............................................................................. 6 Communication Systems (CS) Group .................................................................................................... 11 Compute & Monitoring (CM) Group ..................................................................................................... 16 Computing Facilities (CF) Group ........................................................................................................... 20 Databases (DB) Group ........................................................................................................................... 23 Departmental Infrastructure (DI) Group ............................................................................................... 27 Storage (ST) Group ................................................................................................................................ 28 ACTIVITIES AND PROJECTS REPORTS 2017 CERN openlab ........................................................................................................................................ 34 CERN School of Computing (CSC) .......................................................................................................... 34 Computer Security ................................................................................................................................ 46 Data Preservation ................................................................................................................................. 48 Externally Funded Projects ................................................................................................................... 48 Knowledge Transfer Activities .............................................................................................................. 56 Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) .............................................................................................. 57 3 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 CERN IT department’s mission: The IT Department provides the information technology required for the fulfilment of CERN’s mission in an efficient and effective manner. This includes data processing and storage, networks and support for the LHC and non-LHC experimental programme, as well as services for the accelerator complex and for the whole laboratory and its users. We also provide a ground for advanced research and development of new IT technologies, with partners from other research institutions and industry. This report aims at summarising the key accomplishments performed by the seven CERN IT department groups in 2017, highlighting their contribution to the department’s mission. The report also highlights the contribution from the following projects and activities: CERN openlab, CERN School of Computing, Computer Security, Data Preservation, Externally Funded Projects, UNOSAT, Knowledge Transfer related activities, and Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). 4 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 Groups Reports 2017 5 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 COLLABORATIONS, DEVICES & APPLICATIONS (CDA) GROUP CDA group provides a wide spectrum of services and applications to cover the collaboration, repository, printing, engineering tool, and web needs of the CERN community, on a broad range of devices, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones. In addition, the group supports site- wide infrastructures for authentication and authorization, and for the installation and management of Windows Servers and desktops. In 2017 the main thrusts were from device management to application management and from multipurpose services to more agile dedicated services, with an emphasis on virtualization and containerization for automated, rapid and scalable deployment. APPLICATIONS AND DEVICES Enhanced security and automation on desktops and servers Major automation advances were made in the windows infrastructure management utilising CMF, SCCM, Puppet, DSC, SMA and JIRA. A new terminal server infrastructure was deployed based on Windows Server 2016, upgrading the public cluster and extending many new custom clusters for the ATS sector. The PrintShop pricing was restructured without impact on volume, and the market survey for leased multifunction copiers launched. On the devices front, new contracts were adjudicated for PCs, laptops, screens and workstations and NUCs, and there was a smooth transition to new small-sized desktop models. Hardened PCs were deployed in sensitive services across site, significantly increasing the security of critical laboratory operations. Wi-Fi installation was enabled on Windows laptops and PCs which are now factory delivered with CERN’s WinPE image preinstalled and UEFI enabled. The migration to Windows10 was launched and 25% complete by the end of the year, and the SMBv1 phase-out was completed. On the applications front, increased security and cost savings were achieved by replacing Adobe Acrobat Pro across site. The CERN-wide migration to Office 2016 on Windows was started, and a wizard developed for the migration of DFS to CERNBox which was used to pilot this configuration towards the end of the year. The Mac Self-Service continued its steady growth, and a major upgrade was performed to enable SSO: Macs enrolled in self-service 6 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 In line with Department strategy to consolidate onto Linux, progress was made migrating engineering HPC workloads including LSDyna. The dissemination of EDA tools knowledge continued through seminars, hands-on workshops, hardware presentations and technical training courses. DIGITAL REPOSITORIES Invenio v3 based services launched The multi-year refactoring of Invenio culminated in the release of Invenio-v3 base and auth bundles and launch of new v3 based services such as CDS Videos, OpenData and B2SHARE and Zenodo. These achievements were facilitated by a refactoring also of operations and processes in line with best practice for high-performance teams. In addition, new collaborations were established to help Invenio development with NII and NIMS in Japan and RERO association of public libraries in Switzerland. On the services front, CDS videos were split-off, redeveloped completely on Invenio v3, given a new modern user interface and relaunched as videos.cern.ch. Zenodo made a significant impact in the world-wide community by released DOI versioning, extended grant support and released a new blog and documentation. B2SHARE also made a significant upgrade based on Invenio v3 with extensible metadata and role-based access control. A major new release of CERN Open Data was made, containing 1PB of CMS data: The new videos.cern.ch interface Analysis Preservation service ran pilots with all 4 experiments, and ATLAS and LHCb made official policies recommending Analysis Preservation and REANA services. For REANA a working pilot system for executing analysis workflows on OpenStack/Kubernetes was released. The Digital Memory service launched digitisation projects for each type of historical multimedia, comprising ~5K video, 7 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 ~300K colour photos and ~7K audios. An OAIS Archive Prototype running on CERN Cloud with e- ternity proof of concept was also launched. INTEGRATED COLLABORATION Indico v2 released The flagship collaboration hub, Indico completed the multi-year refactoring with the public release of Indico v2, celebrated with the second Indico User Workshop and the launch of the Indico community hub (https://hub.getindico.io). Room booking and conference management improvements were deployed, and a whole new workflow to support CERN site-access management through Indico was developed and deployed enabling badge printing for visitors. Code of general interest to the world-wide community, such as flask-multipass and flask-pluginengine, were released as independent open source packages. And CERN took over hosting of an Indico instance for PSI. The document conversion server used by Indico and EDMS was completely rewritten to provide better scalability and reliability. And the rooms services equipped another 20 rooms: On the service front, the new Webcast web site was released along with its new player, as well as a new web lecture player which handles low bandwidth connections better. The videoconference portals and backends were upgraded and an improved WebRTC client released. A new anti-spam engine based on FireEye was released into the email service. Preparations for migration of analogue phones to softphones got underway, migrating Lync servers to Skype4Business and deploying a new provisioning workflow for phone numbers. Finally on the Identity Management front, support was extended to certificates for embedded devices, resource management made more granular for unix services allowing AFS opt-out, and Active Directory disaster recovery procedures strengthen and tested. WEB FRAMEWORKS Growth of Platform as a Service for Web Apps based on OpenShift 8 | Page CERN IT Department Groups and Activities Report 2017 The development of next generation