The Infrastructure of Grid Centre Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/KIT

Angela POSCHLAD
SCC FZK / KIT The Infrastructure of Grid Centre Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/KIT

In the last years GridKa at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (FZK/KIT)
emerged as one of the biggest and most important grid sites in Europe.
GridKa's activity is not restricted to the effort of supporting the LHC
experiments as a Tier1 centre in the WLCG structure which demands a high
availability including a 24x7 on-call-duty. Several other international
and national Communities - such as D-Grid - are supported with various
middleware (gLite, unicore, globus, ARC).
The versatile challenges at a large grid centre include scalability,
redundancy, load balancing and steady communication to the users. A good
and reliable monitoring provides the basis for constant enlargement and
rising complexity. It ensures fast problem detection and allows reliable
automation for major services.