The CMS Tier-2 centers that operate the OSG services continue to make good progress toward a production level distributed computing infrastructure for CMS in time for the start of the experiment. All seven US facilities as well as the two Brazilian Tier-2 centers presented site reports.

The 2007 goal for the Tier-2s is the transition to stable operations of facilities and services and the demonstration of sufficient scale to meet the upcoming needs of the experiment. All sites are meeting the targets for capacity and functionality. All U.S. sites were expected to reach roughly 50% of the scale of the final computing centers by the end of 2006, with most facilities reaching the goal for processing, storage, and networking.

The large size of the storage capacity of the Tier-2 centers drives them to deploy storage solutions like dCache. The Tier-2 sites are developing sufficient expertise to provide operations tools and aid one another with support issues. DCache is providing efficient data serving to local applications and utilization of high capacity network links for site-to-site transfers.

The deployment of services and equipment at the Tier-2 centers has reached such a level of stability that we discussed computing models where Tier-3 computing systems could be co-located at Tier-2 facilities in order to rely on the local operations effort Complicated issues like operating costs, infrastructure costs, and power and cooling issues were not resolved, though several sites expressed interest in examining the issues further.