\subsection{Monte Carlo Production}

Over the last two years the IPP-CDF group has lead the coordination
and the production of large-scale physics simulation datasets for the
CDF collaboration.  Since 2004, Warburton has been the co-convener of
the Monte Carlo simulation project taking on the additional
responsibility for the quality of the CDF detector simulation
software. The Canadian commitment is detailed in a memorandum of
understanding, that specifies our responsibilities of coordinating worldwide
large-scale Monte Carlo production and providing the equivalent of one
million $t\bar{t}$ simulated events per day in Canada.

%\subsubsection{Coordination}

While Warburton has taken on the role leader of the CDF Simulation
Group, Mazini and Snihur have shared the responsibility for leading the
Monte Carlo dataset production group. While this started out as a body
responsible for identifying collaboration-wide simulation sample
priorities, producing the simulation sets required and ensuring that
standard techniques and validation procedures were uniformly employed, it
has grown over the last two years to include the organization and
prioritisation of large sample requests made to all off-site CDF
computing farms around the world. In addition, Snihur has 
developed new tools that allow these datasets to be efficiently
cataloged at FNAL, thereby making them accessible to users throughout
the collaboration.  Close contacts with the CDF physics groups (bottom,
electroweak, exotics, QCD, and top) have been successfully maintained
through liaison physics-group representatives who are members of the
Monte Carlo Production Group. The collaboration continues to rely
on the service work contributions of Snihur developing CDF simulation
infrastructure and Mazini and Beauchemin executing the Monte Carlo
production tasks, including day-to-day operations of the Canadian
clusters.

\subsubsection{Computing Facilities}

The Alberta, McGill, and Toronto groups have committed a minimum
equivalent of 250 1 GHz CPUs to the CDF off-site Monte Carlo computing
effort.  The Toronto cluster consists of 224 dual-Pentium-4 nodes,
each with two 2.4~GHz processors (a 1.1 THz cluster) and 2~GB of RAM;
14 dual-Pentium fileservers, each with 2~TB (raw) of SCSI RAID disk;
Gigabit Ethernet interconnectivity; and 1~Gb/s optical connectivity to
CA*net~4. In order to make optimal use of this computing facility the
CDF-IPP group has added a $4$ TB disk server that allows us to store
the datasets necessary for analyses undertaken by the Canadian group
members. While this computing facility has been crucial to our
analyses so far, it is coming under increasing pressure from the ATLAS
Canada collaboration as they approach data-taking.  The lack of disk
storage space will become a serious concern as we tackle datasets that
are an order of magnitude larger than what we have analysed so far. 
The Toronto HEP group has submitted a separate RTI grant to address 
this concern.

%We are looking
%forward to its extension in the context of the CFI infrastructure
%programme. 

The Alberta Thor multiprocessor facility consists of 170
2~GHz processors with 4~TB of disk connected via an optical 1~Gb/s
link to CA*net~4.  Approximately 50 processors from the Thor facility
are being used for CDF Monte Carlo sample generation.

The McGill experimental high-energy physics GAIA cluster, funded by
CFI, was procured in the fall of 2005 and is anticipated to be running
by early 2006.  The facility, which consists of 160 2.4~GHz Opteron
processors with $\sim$6~TB of separate disk space, will be shared by
BaBar, CDF, Dzero, and ATLAS collaborators at McGill.  A significant
fraction of the GAIA cluster will be used for the production of
simulated CDF events in the coming years of Tevatron datataking.  In
addition, the cluster is connected to Fermilab by way of a dedicated
single-mode optical-fibre end-to-end lightpath that bypasses McGill's
backbone network and provides 1~Gb/s access to Quebec's (RISQ) and
Canada's (CA*net~4) research networks.

% {\it I know the following is no longer the best information about
% HEP computing at McGill, but don't know enough about the new CFI
% computing that Andreas, Brigitte and Steve got at McGill. Andreas
% should work on this last couple of sentences...}


\subsubsection{Performance}

Between December 2004 and August 2005, $225$ million 
Monte Carlo events were produced on Canadian farms for official 
large-scale samples. This consumed more than 10,000 CPU
days on our machines (described above) or about 30\% of the processing
power of the Toronto cluster.
%These events populated $yyy$ data sets\footnote{The number of data sets
These events populated $\sim 150$ data sets\footnote{The number of data sets
produced provides a measure of the HQP processing costs involved in
such large-scale production; each sample has overhead related to
prioritisation, set up, submission, logging, validation, transferring
to Fermilab, and bookkeeping.} and used $19$ TB, all of which was
network transferred to Fermilab by Mazini and Caron. 
For the summer 2005 conference
%season, zz\% of all official CDF Monte Carlo events were produced
season, over half of all official CDF Monte Carlo events were produced
using Canadian resources, both in the form of computing equipment and
personnel.

