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Replacement of the HP-PIAF Service

  Dino Ferrero-Merlino CN/ASD


The current HP-PIAF hardware (8 HP755's linked by FDDI, plus 120 GB of disk) is both showing its age, in terms of stability, and becoming very expensive to maintain. Thus, at the end of the year, this PIAF instance will be moved to the Meiko CS-2, using 8 dual-processor (SUN Hypersparc) nodes which are interlinked by the 50 MB/sec CS-2 internal network. Since a CS-2 PIAF instance has existed for some time as part of the GPMIND-2 project, we are confident that the new instance, with increased memory, will be able to give a better turn-around, and support up to approximately 40 concurrent users (whereas the current HP-PIAF gives a much degraded response for more than about 25 concurrent users).

From an operational point of view this will mean that one less flavour of PIAF needs to be supported. We hope to have the hardware in place (more memory is being added to 8 existing CS-2 nodes and new disks have been ordered) soon and we will invite trial users to test out the new system. A complete switch-over, including the transfer (by us) of the n-tuple files on HP-PIAF, will be made during the Christmas shutdown. Details on how to use the new service will be communicated in the coming weeks via the PIAF log message seen after connecting to HP-PIAF.

For more information please have a look at the new PIAF WWW page at URL:

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/asd/paw/piaf/index.html
.


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