Consolidating the interactive analysis and Grid infrastructure at DESY

Abstract

Within WLCG, the DESY site in Hamburg is one of the largest Tier-2 sites with about 18500 CPU cores for Grid workloads. Additionally, about 8000 CPU cores are available for interactive user analyses in the National Analysis Factory [NAF]. After migrating these two batch systems onto a common HTCondor based set-up during the previous four years, we recapitulate the lessons learned during the transition especially since both use cases differ in their workloads. For Grid jobs start-up latencies are negligible and the primary focus is on an optimal utilization of the resources. Complementary, users of the NAF expect a high responsiveness of the batch system as well as the storage for interactive analyses. In this document, we will also give an outlook to future developments and concepts for the DESY high-throughput computing. In the ongoing evolution of the HTC batch system, we are exploring how to integrate anonymous jobs with the batch system as back-end for Function-as-a-Service workflows as well as an option for dynamic expansions to remote computing resources.