National GridPP Service
Tue 11 Aug 2009
The NGS and GridPP have taken another step closer to fully integrating the services they offer to the scientific community. This news means that NGS users will soon be able to add GridPP resources to the list of computing available to them.
The NGS and GridPP both provide grid computing services to academic institutes. Due to the different software in use and varying user base needs, the services have grown up and functioned almost independently. In the next year, the two groups will jointly form the UK's National Grid Initiative (NGI) as part of a wider European Grid Initiative (EGI), providing an impetus to overcome these problems. The first significant step in this direction actually came in 2007 when Jens Jensen, based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), worked out a method for getting the two storage management systems in use (SRM in GridPP and SRB in the NGS) to work together.
Jeremy Coles, the GridPP Production Manager based at the University of Cambridge, said "Being able to publicise resources correctly and simultaneously to both infrastructures was a vital next step towards seamless interoperation between the Grids; it is excellent to see this significant result from recent closer working between our teams
At the moment one of the key differences is the Uniform Execution Environment (UEE) that the NGS provides for its users. As more and more GridPP sites become affiliate members of the NGS they are beginning to also offer this UEE. However, when these pioneer sites started trying to advertise the UEE's availability through the grid's information service (the BDII), this caused problems. The GridPP sites were perfectly set up to publicise normal GridPP services, but the GridPP and UEE information were not being merged correctly so sites were reporting the wrong resources.
Once this became an understood issue Jason Lander at Leeds and Dug McNab from Glasgow started work on a patch for the gLite software being run by GridPP, and across Europe. After testing at Glasgow it is now available for sites using gLite and the resources are being reported correctly
Jason Lander explains the process "With the information that Glasgow provided, we soon identified a minor change to the 'glite-info-generic' component that would allow the UEE to play nicely on a gLite system. We submitted this as a bug report to gLite and Laurence Field at CERN quickly produced a new version. Jonathan Churchill has done a lot of the recent work including updating versions of the applications list and documentation to reflect recent changes to the UEE."
This is not the end of the story. To make full use of the system there are two more important aspects which are currently being worked on. First the NGS has to provide a gLite Workload Management System (WMS) that will allow their users to interact with the GridPP resources. The other step is that the user interfaces that the researchers are using must include protocols to use this WMS.
Experts from both projects are working closely on these, and other interoperability issues, to make sure that the UK grid is providing the best service possible to its researchers.
The new version of the plugin, and associated documentation changes will be fully deployed on 3rd August but for GridPP sites interested in testing out the new ngs-uee-gip-plugin it can be downloaded from:
http://forge.nesc.ac.uk/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58&release_id=253
It is also deployed by the NGS VDT installer script which can be found here
http://forge.nesc.ac.uk/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58&release_id=259
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