LHCb: The Evolution of the LHCb Grid Computing Model

The increase of luminosity in the LHC during its second year of operation (2011) was achieved by delivering more protons per bunch and increasing the number of bunches. Taking advantage of these changed conditions, LHCb ran with a higher pileup as well as a much larger charm physics introducing a bigger event size and processing times. These changes led to shortages in the offline distributed data processing resources, an increased need of cpu capacity by a factor 2 for reconstruction, higher storage needs at T1 sites by 70\% and subsequently problems with data throughput for file access from the storage elements. To accommodate these changes the online running conditions and the Computing Model for offline data processing had to be adapted accordingly. This paper describes the changes implemented for the offline data processing on the Grid, relaxing the Monarc model in a first step and going beyond it subsequently. It further describes other operational issues discovered and solved during 2011, present the performance of the system and concludes by lessons learned to further improve the data processing reliability and quality for the 2012 run augmented by first results on the computing performance from 2012.