phase ii purchasing lcg peb january 6 th 2004 tony.cass@ cern.ch
TRANSCRIPT
Agenda
Timelines & Mechanics
What are we aiming for?
Market Survey Preparation
Tier0/1 & online farm commonality
LCG Project Timescales 2004
– Establish solid understanding of the architectures for production CPU and, especially, the disk services.
2005– Test the above and issue TDR for production services
2006– Start ramp up to production services
» 4.8MCHF for CPU servers, 5MCHF for Disk capacity Minimum 850 CPU servers & 500 Disk servers
2007– Continue ramp up. First beam.
» 3.9MCHF/cpu, 3.3MCHF/disk (700 & 850)
2008– Complete ramp up. First year at full luminosity
» 6.3MCHF/cpu, 5MCHF/disk (1,200 & 1,250)
CERN Purchasing Timescales — I FC Adjudication required in September 2005 to
enable new system delivery early in 2006.– Keep December 2005 FC Committee as a backstop.
FC paper finalised early August 2005. This is just after the summer and work is required after tender bids are opened, so
Set Tender opening date in May 2005. This is ten weeks after Tender sent out, so
Tender must be sent out in March 2005. Papers take time to prepare and review, so
Make sure we know potential suppliers by January 2005.
CERN Purchasing Timescales — II If we want to consider carefully potential
suppliers then much work will be needed, including factory visits. Expect this work to take much of Autumn 2004. Initial replies to Market Survey thus required by August 2004, so
Issue Market Survey in July 2004. This requires FC announcement of purchase no later than
June FC Committee. We plan for announcement at March FC committee, so
Input to March FC paper preparation by end-January 2004.
What do we want to buy?
Functioning, reliable equipment
Solid vendor service
Ease and flexibility of purchase
Assured continuity of supply
How to do (some of) this We aim for a blanket order style arrangement
similar to that used for desktop PCs– The tender qualifies 2-3 companies as potential
suppliers for each type of equipment (cpu servers & disk servers).
– Each time we want to buy something (every 6-12 months) we have the companies bid against each other to ensure a fair price.
– Unlike the desktop system, we will probably split the systems to be bought between at least two suppliers
» Increases the likelihood that some systems arrive» Keeps more companies interested in our business.
BUT: The tender will qualify the lowest bidder(s). Companies we don’t want to deal with must be weeded out at the Market Survey stage.
Who are the companies? Cheap box shifters
– These we do not wish to deal with. They cannot guarantee either consistency across boxes or long term support.
Competent Assemblers– These we deal with today. With the results we know
today.
Solution Providers– e.g./i.e. IBM & HP. Potential of stronger long term
support, but often difficult to differentiate their product from that of a competent assembler on purely technical grounds.
How does this affect CPU servers? It is difficult to imagine that we will not be
looking for companies to supply mini-tower or rack mounted servers similar to those of today.
The impact of failing systems is low. Ensure farm is large enough to cover demand with working systems (c.f. LXBATCH today).– Can we do more to rerun jobs that fail when a box
dies?
We are likely to end up with competent assemblers.
And Disk Servers? Impact of failing systems is high and we all (IT
& experiments) suffer today. We urgently need to understand the reasons for
current problems.– Are EIDE servers inherently ill-suited to our needs?– But SAN solutions are 5-8x the cost per usable GB.– Are there intermediate alternatives?
Being realistic, we have to have a solution that competent assemblers can provide.
Market Survey Preparation Dec’03
– Initial discussions with SPL Jan’04
– Initial outline draft» Company qualification questions—companies asked about ability to
supply MTBF guarantees in MS sent out in December.» “Wild ideas”: Can we buy useable specints/GB and require extra
boxes if we fall below a threshold?
– Provide input for March FC paper on forthcoming tenders. Feb – May
– Iterate on MS drafts– Develop disk server specification for MS
June– Final review
July– MS issued.
Including purchases for online farms? Market Survey
– This will probably be very general—we are seeking “quality” firms that can supply a range of PC equipment.
– Market Surveys can be used for tenders for up to 1 year after initial return date—i.e. until August 2005.
– Likely to be reusable by experiments and we will mention this to FI/SPL as it is prepared.
Tender– I suspect online farms will have tight hardware
constraints due to space limitations (and have heard talk of disk less servers).
– It is thus less likely that a Tier0/1 tender can easily cover the online needs—but not excluded.
– Even without a common tender, there are likely to be advantages if we are all aware of plans in each area.
Conclusion 2006 is a long time away, but CERN purchasing
rules mean critical steps for the phase II purchasing must be taken early in 2004.
Preparation of the Market Survey is key. This is the stage where we can select companies on criteria other than price.
The Market Survey must be sent out by the summer to allow time for careful evaluation of potential bidders during the Autumn.
Planning for disk server purchase is the most worrying area: will we have a good enough understanding of what we want to buy?
