Search

INFN-CNAF is one of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) Tier-1 data centres, providing computing, networking and storage resources to a wide variety of scientific collaborations, not limited to the four LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments. The INFN-CNAF data centre will move to a new location next year. At the same time, the requirements from our experiments and users are becoming increasingly challenging and new scientific communities have started or will soon start exploiting our resources. Currently, we are reengineering several services, in particular our monitoring infrastructure, in order to improve the day-by-day operations and to cope with the increasing complexity of the use cases and with the future expansion of the centre. This scenario led us to implement a data streaming infrastructure designed to enable log analysis, anomaly detection, threat hunting, integrity monitoring and incident response. Such data streaming platform has been organised to manage different kinds of data coming from heterogeneous sources, to support multi-tenancy and to be scalable. Moreover, we will be able to provide an on demand end-to-end data streaming application to those users/communities requesting such kind of facility. The infrastructure is based on the Apache Kafka platform, which provides streaming of events at large scale, with authorization and authentication configured at the topic level for ensuring data isolation and protection. Data can be consumed by different applications, such as those devoted to log analysis, which provide the capability to index large amounts of data and implement appropriate access policies to inspect and visualise information. In this contribution we will present and motivate our technological choices for the definition of the infrastructure, we will describe its components and we will depict use cases which can be addressed with this platform.

The INFN Tier1 data center is currently located in the premises of the Physics Department of the University of Bologna, where CNAF is also located. During 2023 it will be moved to the “Tecnopolo”, the new facility for research, innovation, and technological development in the same city area; the same location is also hosting Leonardo, the pre-exascale supercomputing machine managed by CINECA, co-financed as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, 4th ranked in the top500 November 2022 list. The construction of the new CNAF data center consists of two phases, corresponding to the computing requirements of LHC: Phase 1 involves an IT power of 3 MW, and Phase 2, starting from 2025, involves an IT power up to 10 MW. The new data center is designed to cope with the computing requirements of the data taking of the HL-LHC experiments, in the time spanning from 2026 to 2040 and will provide, at the same time, computing services for several other INFN experiments and projects, not only belonging to the HEP domain. The co-location with Leonardo opens wider possibilities to integrate HTC and HPC resources and the new CNAF data center will be tightly coupled with it, allowing access from a single entry point to resources located at CNAF and provided by the supercomputer. Data access from both infrastructures will be transparent to users. In this presentation we describe the new data center design, providing a status update on the migration, and we focus on the Leonardo integration showing the results of the preliminary tests to access it from the CNAF access points.

Polyphenols have gained increasing attention for their therapeutic potential, particularly in conditions like cancer, due to their established antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Recent research highlights their ability to bind to transition metals, such as copper. This is particularly noteworthy given the key role of copper both in the initiation and progression of cancer. Copper can modulate the activity of kinases required for the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT), a process fundamental to tumor cell dissemination. We have previously demonstrated the copper-binding capacity of oleuropein, a secoiridoid found in Olea europaea. In the present study, we investigated the effect of hydroxytyrosol, the primary oleuropein metabolite, on the metastatic potential of three triple-negative breast cancer cell lines (MDA-MB-231, MDA-MB-468, and SUM159). We found that hydroxytyrosol modulated the intracellular copper levels, influencing both the epithelial and mesenchymal markers, by downregulating copper-dependent AKT phosphorylation, a member of the EMT signaling cascade, through Western blot, RT-qPCR, and immunofluorescence. Indeed, by optical spectra, EPR, and in silico approaches, we found that hydroxytyrosol formed a complex with copper, acting as a chelating agent, thus regulating its homeostasis and affecting the copper-dependent signaling cascades. While our results bring to light the copper-chelating properties of hydroxytyrosol capable of countering tumor progression, they also provide further confirmation of the key role of copper in promoting the aggressiveness of triple-negative breast cancer cells.

Electron paramagnetic resonance, thermoluminescence, and optically stimulated luminescence, with biological tissues and inert materials are well established physical methods for retrospective dosimetry in acute accidental exposures. The objective of this article is to provide a view of the questions still open, the current challenges and the needed solutions. As research on emergency response methods is encountering increasing difficulties in terms of financial and human resources in many countries, it is essential to identify the research priorities and pay attention to cost-effective research paths. The intention of the paper is to stimulate discussion in the scientific community and to encourage collaboration among laboratories toward goals that address the real needs in retrospective dosimetry for acute exposures.

This narrative-report presents the activities of the 13th Field Camp of Italian Emergency Psychologists which, due to the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pande-mic, was held remotely one year after the planned date, on 9 and 17 April 2021. The voluntary organisation Psicologi per i Popoli – Federazione (OdV), on the strength of the training experience of the Field Camps that since 2006 it has been planning and – together with the association Psicologi per i Popoli – Trentino (ODV) – it has been managing at the Centro di Addestramento della Protezione Civile in Marco di Rovereto, puts at the centre of this online event the theme of the training of emergency-urgency psychologists. This training should be accredited by means of a postgraduate specialisation that also legitimises access to the emergency and urgency services of the National Health Service through competitive exams. The article also presents the results of the groups' work in proposing gui-delines for the definition of “operational models” for emergency intervention.

When a radiological and nuclear (R/N) emergency occurs, the categorization of individuals into those who are unaffected and those requiring medical intervention is a high priority. At times, a professional dosimeter is not available and therefore some common belongings may be used as fortuitous dosimeters. The preparation of these objects for the measurement should be such as to give the most accurate and precise results. This paper focused on the Photo-Stimulated Luminescence (PSL) response of salty crackers confronts the problem of sample preparation (mass, grain size), dose response and signal stability. The dose response was determined for doses up to 5 Gy, which allowed the calculation of the limit of detection. Additionally, the signal stability was investigated for samples irradiated with 0.3 and 3 Gy. The observed decrease of the signal does not prevent the detection in the dose range typical for R/N emergency. The main dosimetric characteristics were investigated by using two different models of PSL readers equipped with single (infrared) or double (infrared, blue light) stimulation. The results indicated that the limit of detection can be improved by applying blue light stimulation. Moreover, strong correlation of the measurements performed in the two different instruments, as well as the rapidity of the analysis and the simplicity of the operations, suggest that this method can be suitable for a rapid radiation triage of a large number of civilians in a mass casualty event. The study was simultaneously conducted by two laboratories (Ruder Bošković Institute, RBI, Croatia and Istituto Superiore di Sanità, ISS, Italy) involved in the BioPhyMeTRE project (grant No. G5684) supported by NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme.

The experiences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents showed that dosimetry was the essential tool in the emergency situation for decision making processes, such as evacuation and application of protective measures. However, at the consequent post-accidental phases, it was crucial also for medical health surveillance and in further adaptation to changed conditions with regards to radiation protection of the affected populations. This review provides an analysis of the experiences related to the role of dosimetry (dose measurements, assessment and reconstruction) regarding health preventive measures in the post-accidental periods on the examples of the major past nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Recommendations derived from the review are called to improve individual dose assessment in case of a radiological accident/incident and should be considered in advance as guidelines to follow for having better information. They are given as conclusions.

Experience suggests that current nuclear accident response planning in European countries mostly has a technical focus, with less attention paid to social, psychological and ethical issues. Information provided tends to be directed towards decisions made by experts, rather than for the support of affected populations. The SHAMISEN (Nuclear Emergency Situations - Improvement of Medical And Health Surveillance) consortium, composed of close to 50 experts from 10 countries, performed a critical review of current recommendations and experiences regarding dose assessment and reconstruction, evacuation decisions, long-term health surveillance programmes and epidemiological studies. The review included case studies and lessons drawn from the living conditions and health status of populations affected by the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, taking an integrative approach to health and well-being. Based on this work, SHAMISEN developed a series of comprehensive recommendations aimed at improving the preparedness, response, long-term surveillance and living conditions of populations affected by past or future radiation accidents, in a manner responding to their needs, while minimising unnecessary anxiety.

Food waste policy analysis has traditionally concentrated on supranational or national policies and paid little attention to the role of cities in tackling this phenomenon. Nevertheless, cities have proved to be crucial actors in tackling food waste, launching effective policies and initiatives to address it. By looking at 40 cities across 16 European countries, this study aims to present a new framework for assessing urban food waste policies and initiatives. The framework proposed identifies and sheds light on the links between the different types of policies launched, the main areas of interventions addressed, as well as the different actors intervening in urban food waste management. Finally, it identifies direct and indirect links with the Sustainable Development Goals, showing the role that cities can play in achieving the targets of the UN 2030 Agenda.

In modern data centres an effective and efficient monitoring system is a critical asset, yet a continuous concern for administrators. Since its birth, INFN Tier-1 data centre, hosted at CNAF, has used various monitoring tools all replaced, a few years ago, by a system common to all CNAF departments (based on Sensu, Influxdb, Grafana). Given the complexity of the inter-dependencies of the several services running at the data centre and the foreseen large increase of resources in the near future, a more powerful and versatile monitoring system is needed. This new monitoring system should be able to automatically correlate log files and metrics coming from heterogeneous sources and devices (including services, hardware and infrastructure) thus providing us with a suitable framework to implement a solution for the predictive analysis of the status of the whole environment. In particular, the possibility to correlate IT infrastructure monitoring information with the logs of running applications is of great relevance in order to be able to quickly find application failure root cause. At the same time, a modern, flexible and user-friendly analytics solution is needed in order to enable users, IT engineers and IT managers to extract valuable information from the different sources of collected data in a timely fashion. In this paper, a prototype of such a system, installed at the INFN Tier-1, is described with an assessment of the state and an evaluation of the resources needed for a fully production system. Technologies adopted, amount of foreseen data, target KPIs and production design are illustrated.

In the latest years, CNAF (the national center of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics INFN dedicated to Research and Development on Information and Communication Technologies) has been working on the Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) project for the CDF experiment, active at Fermilab from 1990 to 2011. The main aims of the project are to protect the most relevant part of the CDF RUN-2 data collected between 2001 and 2011 and already stored on tape at CNAF (4 PB), as well as to ensure the availability and the access to the analysis facility to those data over time. Lately, the CDF database, hosting information about CDF datasets such as their structure, file locations and metadata, has been imported from Fermilab to CNAF. Also, the Sequential Access via Metadata (SAM) station data handling tool for CDF data management, that allows to manage data transfers and to retrieve information from the CDF database, has been properly installed and configured at CNAF. This was a fundamental step in the perspective of a complete decommissioning of CDF services on Fermilab side. An access system has been designed and tested to submit CDF analysis jobs, using CDF software distributed via CERN Virtual Machine File System (CVMFS) and requesting delivery of CDF files stored on CNAF tapes, as well as data present only on Fermilab storage archive. Moreover, the availability and the correctness of all CDF data stored on CNAF tapes has been verified. This paper describes all these recent evolutions in detail, presenting the future plans for the LTDP project at CNAF.

In the latest years, CNAF worked at a project of Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) for the CDF experiment, that ran at Fermilab after 1985. A part of this project has the goal of archiving data produced during Run I into recent and reliable storage devices, in order to preserve their availability for further access through not obsolete technologies. In this paper, we report and explain the work done to manage the process of retrieving the aforementioned data, which were stored into about four thousands 2.5/5GB 8mm tape cartridges of different producers, which were widely popular in the nineties. The hardware setup for tape reading is briefly detailed. Particular focus is on describing in-house software tools and backend database that have been set up to drive and orchestrate the tape readers and to deal with the high number of possible problems arising during the process of reading data from hardly reliable media. The outcome of each operation is accounted into the database, making possible to monitor the overall progress and to retry unsuccessful read attempts at a later stage. The implemented solution has proved effective at reading a first 20% of the total amount. The process is currently ongoing. Even though a few aspects of this work are strictly dependant on how the CDF experiment organized its datasets, we believe that several decisions taken and the overall organization still make sense on a variety of use cases, where a relevant amount of data has to be retrieved from obsolete media.

IBM Spectrum Protect (ISP) software, one of the leader solutions in data protection, contributes to the data management infrastructure operated at CNAF, the central computing and storage facility of INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics). It is used to manage about 55 Petabytes of scientific data produced by LHC (Large Hadron Collider at CERN) and other experiments in which INFN is involved, stored on tape resources as the highest latency storage tier within HSM (Hierarchical Space Management) environment. To accomplish this task, ISP works together with IBM Spectrum Scale (formerly GPFS - General Parallel File System) and GEMSS (Grid Enabled Mass Storage System), an in-house developed software layer that manages migration and recall queues. Moreover, we perform backup/archive operation of main IT services running at CNAF, such as mail servers, configurations, repositories, documents, logs, etc. In this paper we present the current configuration of the HSM infrastructure and the backup and recovery service, with particular attention to issues related to the increasing amount of scientific data to manage, expected for the next years.

CNAF is the national center of INFN (Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics) for IT technology services. The Tier-1 data center operated at CNAF offers computing and storage resources to scientific communities as those working on the four experiments of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN and other 30 experiments in which INFN is involved. In past years, monitoring and alerting services for Tier-1 resources were performed with several software, such as LEMON (developed at CERN and customized on the char-acteristics of datacenters managing scientific data), Nagios (especially used for alerting purposes) and a system based on Graphite database and other ad-hoc developed services and web pages. By 2015, a task force has been organized with the purpose of defining and deploying a common infrastructure (based on Sensu, InfluxDB and Grafana) to be exploited by the different CNAF depart-ments. Once the new infrastructure was deployed, a major task was then to adapt the whole monitoring and alerting services. We are going to present the steps that the Tier-1 group followed in order to accomplish a full migration, that is now completed with all the new services in production. In particular we will show the monitoring sensors and alerting checks redesign to adapt them to the infrastructure base on the Sensu software, the web dashboards creation for data presentation, the porting of historical data from LEMON/Graphite to InfluxDB.

The INFN Tier-1 center at CNAF has been extended in 2016 and 2017 in order to include a small amount of resources (∼ 22 kHS06 corresponding to ∼ 10% of the CNAF pledges for LHC in 2017) physically located at the Bari-ReCas site (∼ 600 km distant from CNAF). In 2018, a significant fraction of the CPU power (∼ 170 kHS06, equivalent to ∼ 50% of the total CNAF pledges) is going to be provided via a collaboration with the PRACE Tier-0 CINECA center (a few km from CNAF), thus building a truly geographically distributed (WAN) center. The two sites are going to be interconnected via an high bandwidth link (400-1200 Gb/s), in order to ensure a transparent access to data residing on CNAF storage; the latency between the centers is small enough not to require particular caching strategies. In this contribution we describe the issues and the results of the production configuration, focusing both on the management aspects and on the performance provided to end-users.