A simulation tool for ALICE storage and computing resource usage

The LHC experiments produce many tens of petabytes of data each year, which must be stored, processed and analyzed. The CPU and storage resources required for these activities are planned for and requested on yearly basis. To make a better resource planning, a more fine-grained time prediction for the resource utilization is necessary, taking into account the LHC running conditions and schedule, the experiment-specific data management policies, scientific conferences demands and other criteria. To that end, we developed a flexible and highly configurable simulation tool, which performs a Discrete Event Simulation of the ALICE data flow processes. The tool consists of a Web GUI, through which the necessary parameters are entered and the results of the simulations are graphically visualized. In this paper, we describe the design of the simulation tool and present the preliminary results.