The Swiss ATLAS Computing Prototype

The Swiss ATLAS Computing prototype consists of clusters of PCs located at the universities of Bern and Geneva and at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Manno. In terms of software, the prototype includes ATLAS off-line releases as well as middleware for running the ATLAS off-line in a distributed way. Both batch and interactive use cases are supported. The batch use case is covered by a country wide batch system, the interactive use case is covered by a parallel execution system running on single clusters. The prototype serves the dual purpose of providing resources to the ATLAS production system and providing Swiss researchers with resources for individual studies of both simulated data and data from the ATLAS test beam. In this note the solutions used for achieving this are presented. Initial experience with the system is also described.