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Present: Dave Britton (Chair), Pete Gronbech, Tony Doyle Claire Devereux, Andrew Sansum, Jeremy Coles, Dave Kelsey, Gareth Smith, Andrew McNab, Louisa Campbell (Minutes).
Apologies: Roger Jones, Dave Colling, Steve Lloyd, Tony Cass, Pete Clarke.
1. Tier-1 Procurement
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See Tier-1 Manager’s Report (SI-6) for update.
ACTION 584.1 ALL to examine specification requirements for future procurements.
2. GridPP4+ Staff Grants
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PG advised that following last week’s PMB he emailed Tony requesting a funding overlap as has previously been in place. Tony’s initial reaction was not particularly hopeful in light of recent changes to STFC rules on this. He has challenged the ruling on GridPP’s behalf but is not overly optimistic of success. Sites will need to review funding and make best use of available funding.
ACTION 584.2 PG will forward Tony’s email regarding recent STFC rule changes on overlap funding to PMB and PI’s so that they can plan and make best use of current funding.
3. AOCB
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DB noted that Jonathan Flynn stepped down from his role as Chair of CRSG. DB will email Tony Medland to enquire about the replacement Chair.
ACTION 584.3 DB will email Tony Medland to enquire who will replace Jonahan Flynn as Chair of CRSG.
4. Standing Items
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SI-0 Bi-Weekly Report from Technical Group (DC)
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DC not present, no report submitted.
SI-1 Dissemination Report (SL)
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SL not present, no report submitted.
SI-2 ATLAS Weekly Review and Plans (RJ)
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RJ not present, no report submitted.
SI-3 CMS Weekly Review and Plans (DC)
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DC not present, no report submitted.
SI-4 LHCb Weekly Review and Plans (PC)
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AMcN reported that some jobs at RAL had experienced issues. This was noted on Thursday and Friday and affected Monte Carlo jobs. GS will check on this and noted it was likely Andrew Lahiff was aware of the matter, it is also likely to be a local issue that has not been experienced elsewhere.
ACTION 584.4 GS will investigate issues experienced with jobs at RAL between 17-18 December.
SI-5 Production Manager’s report (JC)
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Activity has dropped off as we approach the holiday period.
1. I would like to thank Matt Rásó-Barnett for his contributions to GridPP while at Sussex. He finished in the sysadmin role last week.
2. There will be no CA certificate signing and no helpdesk support from the afternoon of 24th Dec 2014 until the 4th Jan 2016. We will be running our Region on Duty oversight on a best-efforts basis.
3. The LZ collaboration have indicated a desire to now enable their work at other UK sites actively involved in the collaboration. We will continue pursuing this early next year.
4. There was an EGI Operations Management Board meeting last week: https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2383. The focus areas were: security update (a new SVG issue handling procedure was agreed and an EGI AUP); the move to ARGO monitoring (note OpenStack native interfaces are now monitored directly by Nagios ); the future of WMSes (several EGI countries are keen to maintain them); UMB status (support for CentOS7); and updates on the Long tail of science activities.
5.This afternoon, Andrew McNab and I will be discussing with EGI our Community Platform options in relation to the GridPP DIRAC service and VAC/Vcycle. Topics includes: what goes into the EGI marketplace, relevant Operations Level Agreements and who can access the services.
6. NGI_UK has about 35 open tickets as the year ends. These were reviewed at the last ops team meeting for 2015 last week and the critical ones pursued since then. Several relate to deletion of ATLAS PRODDISK or enablement of pilot jobs.
SI-6 Tier-1 Manager’s Report (GS)
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General:
– A relatively quiet week. For many staff this was their final week before taking leave over the Christmas/New Year holiday.
Castor:
– Nothing significant to report.
Networking:
– The steps necessary for the complete removal our old ‘core’ switch have been completed.
– Last week one of the boards in the UKLight Router was replaced and another added. This has enabled us to take the link between the UKLight Router and the Tier1 to 4*10Gbit. Furthermore the ‘bypass’ link from the UKLight Router to the RAL border router has been doubled to 2*10Gbit. In addition to the increased bandwidth to/from the Tier1 this increases the resilience of these connections ahead of the Christmas/New Year holiday.
Batch:
– No significant changes made or problems encountered.
Procurement:
– The tenders closed on Friday (18th December) and are being evaluated.
SI-7 LCG Management Board Report of Issues (DB)
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Nothing to report.
REVIEW OF ACTIONS
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578.2 AM and JC to investigate EGI community platforms to see whether VAC and possibly DIRAC could be registered. Ongoing.
581.3 ALL to members who have not already done so should submit reports to PG. Ongoing.
582.4 DC to insert an update in the wiki page regarding communication with LZ. Ongoing.
583.1 AS will pursue the possibility of reducing venue hire costs for hosting CERMVMFS at RAL and ensure the venue is wireless-enabled. Catalin has circulated new costings due to alternative venue for 1 day. It was agreed to support these costs and DB will email Catalin to confirm this. Done.
583.2 PG to request an extension to the end date of the grants to help with the overlapping period, in line with previous grants. Done.
583.3 GS to check whether we have sufficient servers to accommodate increased tape requests and whether we would face the same issues again if LHCb make similar requests in the future. Ongoing.
583.4 GS will investigate whether there is a need to issue guidelines to the experiments outlining what is acceptable and if we could handle any requests several times greater than the LHCb request. Ongoing.
ACTIONS AS OF 21.12.15
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578.2 AM and JC to investigate EGI community platforms to see whether VAC and possibly DIRAC could be registered. Ongoing.
581.3 ALL members who have not already done so should submit reports to PG asap. Ongoing.
582.4 DC to insert an update in the wiki page regarding communication with LZ. Ongoing.
583.3 GS to check whether we have sufficient servers to accommodate increased tape requests and whether we would face the same issues again if LHCb make similar requests in the future. Ongoing.
583.4 GS will investigate whether there is a need to issue guidelines to the experiments outlining what is acceptable and if we could handle any requests several times greater than the LHCb request. Ongoing.
584.1 ALL to examine specification requirements for future procurements.
584.2 PG will forward Tony’s email regarding recent STFC rule changes on overlap funding to PMB and PI’s so that they can plan and make best use of current funding.
584.3 DB will email Tony Medlan to enquire who will replace Jonahan Flynn as Chair of CRSG.
584.4 GS will investigate issues experienced with jobs at RAL between 17-18 December.