GridPP Meeting 913
Present:
David Britton –Chair, Daniela Bauer, David Colling, Davide Costanzo, Alastair Dewhurst, Katy Ellis, Alessandra Forti, Peter Gronbech, Jonathan Hays, Roger Jones, David Kelsey, Steve Lloyd, Andrew Sansum, Sam Skipsey and Jill Sambrook (Minutes)
Apologies: Andrew McNab, Peter Clarke, Tony Doyle
ITEMS
0) OSC [DB]
The OSC meeting went very well.
Jeremy Yates, the chair, expressed his thanks for work done on financials over the past several months and presentation of this report.
Main outcomes of discussion:
1 need improved communication between PPD and the office on Tier1 spending [to be handled by the office, on models already used in some other groups]
2 ensuring that GridPP is properly represented in the Comprehensive Spending Review, and allocations for future spend in general. We believe this is partly an action on the OsC themselves, but we have also been encouraged to “be ready for last minute requests”
May 2026 next full oversight committee meeting. Possibly a face to face in London.
Jeremy Y will be the chair for 1 more year, so next year will likely be his last meeting.
2) SSI funding bids [AD]
Software sustainability
Putting together a project/projects that cover wider than just PPE.
Expression of interest to be in by 30th May. AD has made some progress on this and started completing the online application.
AD looking for name suggestions and possibly how many people to be involved in the leadership team. (DB suggested no more than 2 leads).
Name suggestions – “Saffron” as acronym
AD to circulate some wording over the next couple of days and looking for comments.
STANDING ITEMS
SI-0 Tier-1 Manager’s weekly report & Technical Meetings [AD]
Technical meetings – now being scheduled by Brij. AF discussed the recent Analysis Facilities/Infrastructure TM.
Meetings that have taken place in the past few weeks:
02 May – Analysis facilities discussion,(continuing from GridPP53) Part2
25 April – Analysis facilities discussion,(continuing from GridPP53)
04 Apr- SNO+ reprocessing campaign
Tier1:
Operationally there are a few tickets:
AlexR change to allow LHCb jobs to write to Echo directly unfortunately allowed a race-condition where uploads can race deletions, resulting in a small number of lost files. The change has been rolled back, and file loss is being recovered.
LHCb process will be changed to not immediately attempt a reupload on failure.
ATLAS ticket
Issues with transfers to and from Glasgow and other sites. There are a large number of failures between the 2 sites. 500 error. This appears to be triggered by particular Token authentication flows and is currently being looked into.
LHCOPN connection briefly broken. Break was on land in Netherlands and resolved quickly.
Procurement –
New Tape in production and holding up well.
Disk not yet in production. Problem with internal communication of machines. Issue identified. James should be fixing these this week. Slight delay of a couple of weeks. Looks like 8-10 weeks later than expected.
RAL donating 6+ year old kit to Sheffield to replace some of their estate.
SI-1 ATLAS Weekly Review and Plans [DCos]
-TAPE at RAL
-ATLAS number of jobs gone down over the past days.
-Varnish and squid software discussion. Lots of talk of Varnish to replace issues with Squid, but AD and AF had reservations.
SI-2 CMS Weekly Review and Plans [DC, KE]
-TOKEN tests for ARC CE’s now starting to run
-things are looking better for Bristol and Brunel. Brunel is now green. Some work for Bristol to do.
-PPD working on strategies. KE leading on computing.
SI-3 LHCb Weekly Review and Plans [AM]
NTR other than what AD discussed.
SI-4 Operations Meeting Report [SS,PG,PC] –
NTR
SI-5 LCG Management Board Report of Issues [DB]
NTR – takes places tomorrow.
SI-6 External Contexts (eg NGI/EGI) [PC/JH]
Discussion at the beginning.
REVIEW OF ACTIONS
868.3 DB and SS to look at Storage accounting – ongoing
913.1 Draft UKRI research data policy document – PC, SS, DC and RJ to take this forward and send collective feedback.
913.2 SS – Site security to be added as a standing agenda item for the weekly ops meetings
913.3 SS -to schedule a discussion about GridPP site security and the bigger picture at the Ambleside meeting. David Crooks and others could lead on this discussion.
Next Meeting
Next PMB meeting is on the 2nd June.