Dr. Ulrich Schwickerath, Project Manager, CERN, Switzerland

In 2009 CERN has started to develop an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) setup. Since then, significant progress has been made in the implementation of the new system. In spring 2010 about 500 recent batch worker nodes have been added temporarily to the system, which allowed to perform large scale tests of the new infrastructure. The batch computing farm which makes a critical part of the CERN data centre now had the possibility to use this IaaS to provision a large number of virtual batch worker nodes. By making use of the new equipment, both the virtual machine provisioning systems and the batch application itself have been tested extensively at large scale.This way it has been demonstrated that the system can sustain 15,000 or more concurrent virtual batch worker nodes.

The basic ideas and concepts for a virtualized batch system, based on this new infrastructure, are shown. In this presentation we describe our plans for the virtual batch farm including a vision of how things might evolve in the future. The general status, results from large scale tests, and experiences are presented, together with an outlook for possible extensions.