Chip Watson E-mail from April 11,2012

The following is an e-mail Chip sent out to everyone on April 11, 2012

All,

As you prepare for the 12 GeV software and computing review, please be sure to capture all
of your computing requirements, including level 3 trigger (if any), calibration, offline analysis,
and simulation.  If you cannot come to a firm conclusion on any of these numbers, please
specify ranges (say, one sigma).  If you have an expensive offline routine you hope to replace
with a faster one, you can annotate that and indicate the impact (downward) on your computing
requirements if that routine can be finished and validated.  You will be permitted to adjust
these annually, but future reviewers will look negatively on large adjustments in either direction.

Similarly, we will need good requirements for tape storage, and some reasonable estimates on
disk space if that is expected to be a critical item in your offline analysis plans (otherwise we will
scale our current system by some composite of cores and petabytes stored).

I would like to have your final review numbers for offline computing (in units of 2011 Intel cores,
Westmere or Nehalem, 2.4 or 2.53 GHz, and petabytes of tape and possibly terabytes of disk) by
the second week of May so that I can prepare a consistent presentation for scientific computing
support.  The requirements must be specified separately for 2013, 2014, and 2015 so that I can
make a multi-year plan.  Graham and I will review these, and the costs, and present the cost data
to Rolf for inclusion into his multi-year plans.

Feel free to email, call (x7101) or drop by if you would like to discuss any of your plans and get any
feedback from me, as I am more than willing to help.

regards,
Chip