IT

IP2I’s IT department, made up of fifteen people, has the dual responsibility of making the laboratory’s information system available and providing support in terms of IT development to the research teams.

Our primary mission is the administration of the laboratory’s infrastructure, network, services and computer equipment; we are guarantors of the security and good availability of the IS to the staff. We manage the IT budget and provide technical support to users both on their workstations and on the experimental devices.

Our other mission is to bring our expertise to researchers as part of experiments and projects, whether it is for the implementation of infrastructure (network, storage, computation), systems engineering or low-level and high-level software development.

In order to fulfil these missions, we maintain a constant technological watch and research and development activity in our fields of interest, so as to respond in the most relevant way possible to the needs of all users.

Beyond the laboratory, we interface with our counterparts in the central services of the University (UCBL) and the CNRS, and we participate in regional and national professional networks; more specifically, we collaborate more directly with the neighbouring IN2P3 Computing Centre.

The activities of the members of the department range from systems and network administration to software development or systems engineering for physics detectors. Along with technology watch and R&D activities, there are also crosscutting activities such as IT security, data management or computing that combine different fields and expertise.

• We manage an infrastructure distributed over two machine rooms (70 sq.m / 60kW, 197U) for the servers, a telecom room and 5 patchbays for the network (1200 sockets, 70 switches on 3 buildings).

This involves managing all the logistics of these rooms and equipment, particularly in terms of cooling, electrical distribution and network connectivity.

We host and maintain a large number of services distributed on physical or virtual servers, servers dedicated to research groups or to tests. We guarantee access to these services to users. We also operate a variety of storage and calculation services adapted to different uses: user file server, projects, experimental data (including a local calculation farm with 800 cores).

• We manage a T3 node of the LCG grid. It is hosted by the CC-IN2P3 since 2017 and includes 1500 cores and 900TB of storage (19Mh CPU in 2019, 100% availability).
• We are responsible for the computer hardware and software and user support: this represents approximately 700 workstations under Windows, Linux and MacOS. The park is made up of individual workstations, but also of equipment dedicated to data acquisition or processing. We manage the dedicated IT budget and hardware purchases.
• IT security is a central activity: we manage the implementation of the security policy of our supervising bodies at both IS and fleet level and play an awareness-raising role among users.
• Our software development activities also cover a fairly wide spectrum of applications. We are involved in large collaborations as well as in local projects or in the framework of consulting:
  • System engineering or developments close to detectors / instruments, on-board with more or less constraints, low-level data acquisition: CMS, ILC, DIAPHANE.
  • Higher-level developments for distributed acquisition, data formatting or experimental monitoring: Ricochet, Euclid, AGATA, Proto-DUNE.
  • R&D and developments in machine learning with online and offline analysis applications: NEDA, AGATA, Ricochet.
  • Expertise in scientific computation, data management, database and software design with graphical user interface: Euclid, Detector Construction Monitoring Tool.
  • Implementation of dedicated storage and computing infrastructures: Proto-DUNE, CRAL.
  • We also develop web tools and applications for internal use: PHP/MySQL, Java…
  • We take an active part in the animation of a transverse calculation and machine learning group within the laboratory level which aims at pooling skills, knowledge and resources in these fields.

The department gathers system administrators, fleet managers and developers. We have experience in a wide range of skills:

• Software development: database, web oriented, scientific calculation, visualization, machine learning…
• On-line development: data acquisition, sensor/instrument expertise, embedded systems and pseudo-real time…
• Computing and storage platforms: high-performance computing (HTC and HPC), computing grids, high-performance storage, distributed storage.
• Networks: architecture, configuration, deployment and filtering, specific equipment.
• System administration: deployment of configuration and automatic installations, containerization, virtualization, …
• IT security.
• Machine room logistics, contracts: service provider management, follow-up.
• IT stock management: procedures, purchase/budgets/procurements, follow-up, after-sales service, software environments specific to our themes.