Wednesday 16 December 2009

Last day of LHC running this year

After so much celebration of first days of LHC running, it is time today to celebrate the last day of LHC running... this year. In few hours the LHC will be switched of and accelerated protons will go on holidays until next year.
I has been a very nice and long awaited time since last 23rd November the experiments started taking collision data. Today the LHC goes on holidays, but the WLCG does not. This piece of distributed infrastructure we have been building in the last six years should stay up and running 24x7 so that the precious data taken can be processed, re-processed, re-re-processed and so on. Somebody said that "data can be equated with money that has value only if it is used and circulated". So this is what we will be doing in the next weeks: giving value to the LHC data. This will not yet be haunting the Higgs, but less sexy minimum bias soft QCD events... but still, LHC physics after all.
At PIC Tier-1 we will carefully look to the services to ensure maximum availability and efficiency.
For the moment, what can we say about PIC's performance during "the month in which the LHC started" (aka November 2009)? We just received this Christmas gift from the official WLCG availability reports:
  • PIC availability and reliability for OPS VO = 100%
  • For ATLAS VO: 98% availability and 100% reliability (only ATLAS Tier-1 with max score)
  • For CMS VO: 100% availability and reliability (FZK also got max score for CMS)
  • For LHCb: 98% availability and 99% reliability (only CERN got 100% for LHCb)