Documentation Links
This page is a collection of pointers to external documentation (generally user documentation). The links are grouped according to the source of the documentation, and some comments are given on the nature, usefulness and reliability of the various sources. Bear in mind that wikis in particular are often edited by many different people, so the content may be variable.
Things are changing fairly rapidly so be aware that information may be out of date; most sources will have some kind of modification date. Anything more than a year old is likely to have some information which is now obsolete.
Also be aware that different Grid projects have different user bases and sometimes use different mixes of technology. Some information about the various projects can be found here.
This list is certainly not complete; if you find any other useful links (or any errors) please notify the Documentation Officer.
LCG
The LCG home page is the starting point for all information about the project. However, the organisation of the site leaves something to be desired so it can be difficult to find things. The main LCG user start page, including a link to the user guide, is here, although this is mostly just a few links to other pages.
The LCG GOC wiki has some user guides (rather limited so far), and a FAQ page (mainly about interpreting various error messages). Some user tools are also described.
The LCG directory has a huge selection of links to various things. Many of these are aimed at system administrators, but there are also many which are relevant to users.
The LCG Experiment Integration and Support (EIS) group has a separate home page, although the content there is limited. Also note that at the time of writing there are still some links to pages which are now obsolete, so be aware of the modification date (older LCG pages also have a different style to the recent ones).
The main EIS page is in the LCG wiki. There isn't much documentation there but there are some useful pointers, including links to wiki areas for various VOs (maintained by EIS rather than the VOs themselves).
The LCG service challenge group also has an area on the wiki, but this is rather technical and probably not of general interest.
EGEE
The EGEE home page is the main project portal. It's divided into sub-sites for public information, training and project-internal technical information. For most purposes the latter area is most useful, but it's worth being aware of what's in the other two. In general the site is fairly easy to navigate once you get to grips with the project structure. For users the most important Activities are SA1 (deployment and operations) and NA4 (application support).
GGUS is intended to be the main portal for all users. In addition to the user support role it is also trying to collect documentation, but at the moment this is a rather unstructured list. Even so it's a good starting point. There are also links to some other sites.
gLite documentation is reasonably good, and the manuals for the various middleware components are comprehensive. However, there is relatively little information about how the various components interact in the system as a whole.
EGEE has a user support group which maintains some documentation related to various use cases.
The JRA1 Workload Management, Data Management and Information and Monitoring groups have their own pages giving more detailed information. There is also some information on LCAS/LCMAPS which is used with VOMS, although VOMS itself does not seem to be documented beyond the general gLite documentation mentioned above.
The EGEE SA1 (Grid deployment) group uses a document management system which lists everything but doesn't make them entirely easy to find. However, there is a search system available.
The CIC portal user area is intended to provide various operational information for VO members, but this is still under development. In general this is likely to contain news and status information rather than documentation.
The EGEE Digital Library includes training material provided by the NA3 Activity, and provides metadata searches. It is open to everyone for search/retrieval, but a certificate is required for resource contribution, and for commenting on DL objects. A combination of these comments and the work of the NA3 Editorial Task Force helps users to identify the most relevant and current material.
There is some information about the use of parallel (MPI) programs on the CERN wiki, and there is also information maintained by the Irish and Spanish Grid projects.
EDG
EDG (European DataGrid) was the predecessor to EGEE. EDG documentation has mostly been superseded, but the WP1 documentation for the Resource Broker is still largely valid (as applied to the LCG RB rather than the new gLite WMS) and contains some details which are hard to find elsewhere. The gLite documentation mentioned above is an alternative, but those manuals refer to various features which are not yet deployed in the production system. (With gLite 3.0 both versions of the Resource Broker are deployed, but the LCG version is still the main one for normal use.)
Note: watch out for EDG documents in the results of a web search, as they are usually obsolete. The same goes for anything from the DataTAG project, which was a sister project to EDG.
EGEE regions
Sites in EGEE are grouped into regions (GridPP is part of the UK-Ireland region), and the regional projects generally have their own web sites, as do many individual sites. These can generally be found by following links from the EGEE SA1 web site. There are too many to list here, but a few are good enough to deserve special mention.
The Italian INFN-GRID has a lot of documentation, look under "Access to the Grid" in the menu bar. There is also the GILDA web site with tutorials and a demo.
Note that INFN have developed a version of the LCG UI which can be installed by a non-privileged user, known as UIPnP.
Grid Ireland have quite a large collection of user information.
The DESY laboratory has a reasonably good site, although most of the information can also be found elsewhere.
SEEGrid (South-East Europe) has a fairly extensive web site and also a wiki, although again the information is similar to other sites. In particular see the Gridification guide for information and guidance about porting applications to the Grid.
OSG
OSG is the US partner of LCG, although it runs somewhat different middleware. The OSG GridUsersGuide gives detailed information about using OSG. Other things on the same site may be of some interest.
Other UK
The main e-science Grid in the UK is the National Grid Service (NGS). Currently it runs somewhat different middleware to LCG/EGEE. The user documentation page is fairly thin at the moment and not oriented to GridPP users.
The Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC) runs various support activities for the whole UK e-science community, and in particular runs the Certification Authority (CA) which issues Grid certificates.
Other international
The Globus project provides much of the basic middleware on which nearly all Grids are based. However, the information they provide is likely to be too technical for most users, and also does not necessarily relate to the LCG/EGEE production system (this is currently based on version 2 of the Globus toolkit whereas Globus are now up to version 4).
Similarly the Condor project provides underlying middleware used in the job submission system, but again their documentation is rather technical.
The Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) project packages Globus, Condor and some other middleware, and that package is used as the basis for the LCG/EGEE software distribution. This has lots of links to underlying projects, although some of these may be out of date.
The GLUE information schema is a collaboration between various Grid projects. The documentation is fairly technical, but is the definitive source for the schema definition.
Experiment/VO pages
Most experiments will have web sites, and there will often be Grid-specific areas. Users will need to know how to use the software which relates to their experiment in the Grid context, and this will generally only be covered on the experiments' own web sites. However, at present many of their Grid areas seem to be rather out-of-date.
Atlas users currently seem to be served best. Steve Lloyd's Atlas workbook is a general tutorial for Atlas software. There is also an introduction for Atlas users from Glasgow. However, the general Atlas Grid page seems that it may be out of date and appears rather chaotic. Most Atlas information is now in the CERN wiki, and in particular there is a news page for users with a variety of information.
Similarly, CMS has a new workbook for its software, although the Grid content is somewhat limited. The general CMS Grid page seems to refer to the old EDG Grid activity and is now obsolete.
Phenogrid are a small UK-specific VO but have a reasonable amount of information.
There is an LHCb tutorial page here, but this is mostly not Grid-specific.
The BaBar Grid documentation again seems largely out of date. Similarly for the general LHCb Grid page.
Last modified Mon 14 December 2009 . View page history
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