Optimising costs in WLCG operations

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project (WLCG) provides the computing and storage resources required by the LHC collaborations to store, process and analyse the 50 Petabytes of data annually generated by the LHC. The WLCG operations are coordinated by a distributed team of managers and experts and performed by people at all participating sites and from all the experiments. Several improvements in the WLCG infrastructure have been implemented during the first long LHC shutdown to prepare for the increasing needs of the experiments during Run2 and beyond. However, constraints in funding will affect not only the computing resources but also the available effort for operations. This paper presents the results of a detailed investigation on the allocation of the effort in the different areas of WLCG operations, identifies the most important sources of inefficiency and proposes viable strategies for optimising the operational cost, taking into account the current trends in the evolution of the computing infrastructure and the computing models of the experiments.