GridPP PMB Meeting 608

GridPP PMB Meeting 608 (26.09.16)
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Present: Dave Britton(Chair), Tony Cass, Pete Clarke, Jeremy Coles, David Colling, Pete Gronbech, Roger Jones, Andrew McNab, Andrew Sansum, Gareth Smith, Louisa Campbell (Minutes).

Apologies: Tony Doyle, Dave Kelsey, Steve Lloyd.

1. Spend plan regarding LHC resource requests and Tier-2 h/w purchasing timing
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Considerable work has been undertaken on these aspects and AS summarised discussions over the last week to the PMB. The major difficult is the large uncertainty over the future cost, capacity and timing of the next generation of tape media. The various options and associated risks were discussed but it was concluded that we still didn’t have all the information require. Further work was required and DB needed to talk with Tony Medland again.

ACTION 608.1: AS will consider spend requirements to meet increased 2017 and 2018 pledges and circulate to PMB this week.

2. OSC documents
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New email has been received from STFC with instructions that are designed to align the GridPP oversight committee with others within STFC. Guidelines ask for provision of project management plan which can be worked up from the GridPP4+ plan with extracted elements as required. This provides an overall outline of the project at the 90% level awarded. Additionally the OSC require a written report which is similar to the Project report with exec summary, progress, action points from previous OSC meetings, progress on work packages and other packages, additional information (like financial info), top level information, risk register, etc. Risk Register and other elements should be implanted, the financial summary format differs slightly but does not differentiate between capital and research costs. Previously the financial and other reports were separate, but these will now be combined in a single report. Actions on PMB members largely still align with this, PG will check and review the OSC actions from the last PMB to ensure there are no gaps in the new document then circulate to the PMB. Some members have already provided input to the Risk Register.

ACTION 608.2: DB will forward OSC comments to PG from last time.

3. Tier-1 review date
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AS is looking at potential dates and will circulate shortly.

4. AOCB
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a) EOSCpilot
AS noted this has now been fully funded as confirmed by Juan on Friday as an H2020 project. This will not have a direct impact on GridPP5 but achieved a good score.
On a related note on H2020 – the HNSci cloud procurement is running – 3 tranches will be purchased and £30K resource will be paid from GridPP for that (DB & AS will consider).

b) GridPP38 location – members will consider an appropriate venue – Lancaster University has previously been suggested.

5. Standing Items
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SI-0 Bi-Weekly Report from Technical Group (DC)
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No technical meeting has recently been scheduled – due next Friday and report available next PMB.

SI-1 Dissemination Report (SL)
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Not present, no report.

SI-2 ATLAS Weekly Review and Plans (RJ)
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Not present, no report

SI-3 CMS Weekly Review and Plans (DC)
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Using HLT at cloud is now working very well. The PMB thanked Andrew Lahiff and others who have had input to this. DB noted a mention at the MB regarding shortage of tape, DC will circulate the most recent report to the PMB. If there is headroom then pledged amounts for CMS can be brought forward early if necessary, but will need to be clarified and a request formalised but this appears achievable.

SI-4 LHCb Weekly Review and Plans (PC)
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Nothing significant to report UK specific. There is currently a review of management processes being undertaken and AM will shortly ask for submissions from the sites in this regard.

SI-5 Production Manager’s report (JC)
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1. We have added vo.moedal.org to https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/GridPP_approved_VOs as an approved VO. (MoEDAL is a monopole and exotics experiment at the LHC: http://moedal.web.cern.ch/) and a couple of our sites expressed interest in supporting it.

2. A problem with the Apel Pub and Sync tests developed last Tuesday and was resolved on Wednesday: https://operations-portal.egi.eu/broadcast/archive/1532. This led to the tests being paused along with accounting portal updates.

3. There will be a DPM workshop on the 23th and 24th of November 2016 at LPNHE(Paris). GridPP remains a core contributor.

Wider points that may be of interest to some.

4. The IGTF will release a regular update to the trust anchor repository (1.77) – for distribution from today onwards.

5. There is the Digital Infrastructure for Research (DI4R) conference in Krakow, Poland this week: http://www.digitalinfrastructures.eu/programme

SI-6 Tier-1 Manager’s Report (GS)
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Networking:
– A problem was found last week when outbound traffic started to use only of the two OPN links. On investigation it was found that the ECMP (Equal-cost multi-path routing) had been reset in UKLight router. This was re-configured and the problem fixed.
– We are progressing the work needed to replace the UKLight Router.

Castor:
– Testing of Castor 2.1.15 is still proceeding OK. We are looking at scheduling. However, staff availability may delay the rollout.

Tape System:
– Following the ‘preventative maintenance’ on the tape libraries there will be an intervention on the libraries that is being planned for the first week of November. It should need an outage of a short working day for each of the libraries.

Services:
– Yesterday (Sunday) morning, there were problems with top-level BDIIs where the daemons crashed. This resolved itself within an hour or so. The cause is not yet understood.
– We had another occurrence of a problem with the CVMFS squids a week ago (mentioned at last week’s meeting). Following investigations two actions were taken: The TCP parameters on our CVMFS Stratum1 server were adjusted and a recent update to the version of the CVMFS client on the worker nodes was rolled back. The problem correlated with a high rate of requests to the Stratum1 server (many from outside the UK).

SI-7 LCG Management Board Report of Issues (DB)
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WLCG service report was submitted and there was nothing impacting GridPP. Ian reported on increased resource pledge. Because of a bad connection it was not possible to gather full information on data management organisation re proposal to set up a data management coordination group and the proposal presented for one person per experiment and others to determine long term WLCG data requirements focussing on medium term developments. It is unclear what the membership is this it was noted this was a small group and low key, not a decision-making body but an oversight committee/discussion forum. IPB6 report was presented by DK re services at sites and clarification on timetable and ongoing discussion.

SI-8 External Contexts (PG)
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Nothing of note to report.

REVIEW OF ACTIONS
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600.1: DC to contact Julia Sedgebeer at Imperial to informally discuss and address SuperNemo’s computing needs and request Daniella and Tom to await outcome of these discussions before progressing further. Done.
602.3: AS will request that Jens make a presentation to the PMB supported by a written report on plans for AAAI project with Dirac as well as proposed reporting. (UPDATE: AS will try to set up date for Jens to present remotely at a PMB soon) Done.
603.1: AS will discuss with Jens and confirm agreement for 150 TB tape storage capacity for the Nuclear Physics request on the provision it can be accessed by existing mechanisms in the GridPP suite of tools. Ongoing.
605.1: DK will investigate costs and timescales of upgrading the OPN Link to 30 and report back to PMB. Ongoing.
605.2: PG will go through data required with PMB members concerned this week to agree inclusion in the project map and reports. Ongoing.
605.3: ALL members to review risks on the register to which their names are attached, and provide interim feedback. (UPDATE: PG will provide the most up to date re-ordered version) Ongoing.
606.3: AS will propose a convenient date for Tier1 review and circulate to PMB for consideration. Ongoing.
607.1: AS will provide figures on Tier1 and Tier2 pledges and available spend soon. Done.
607.2: PG will produce a spreadsheet containing explicit detail on Capital and Resource for Tier1 and as well as Tier1 and Tier2 pledges to include LHC requirements. Ongoing.
607.3: PG and SL will circulate details of F2F meeting on 24 October at Queen Mary. Done.
607.4: ALL to contribute to the OSC Project Status Report. Ongoing.
607.5: DB to contribute Introduction for OSC report. Ongoing
607.6: DB & PC to contribute Wider Context for OSC report. Ongoing
607.7: GS and AS to contribute Tier1 Status Report for OSC report. Ongoing.
607.8: JC to contribute Deployment Status for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.9: RJ to contribute ATLAS User Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.10: DC to contribute LHCb User Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.11: SL (and Tom Whytnie) to contribute Impact and Dissemination Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.

ACTIONS AS OF 26.09.16
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603.1: AS will discuss with Jens and confirm agreement for 150 TB tape storage capacity for the Nuclear Physics request on the provision it can be accessed by existing mechanisms in the GridPP suite of tools. Ongoing.
605.1: DK will investigate costs and timescales of upgrading the OPN Link to 30 and report back to PMB. Ongoing.
605.2: PG will go through data required with PMB members concerned this week to agree inclusion in the project map and reports. Ongoing.
605.3: ALL members to review risks on the register to which their names are attached, and provide interim feedback. (UPDATE: PG will provide the most up to date re-ordered version) Ongoing.
606.3: AS will propose a convenient date for Tier1 review and circulate to PMB for consideration. Ongoing.
607.2: PG will produce a spreadsheet containing explicit detail on Capital and Resource for Tier1 and as well as Tier1 and Tier2 pledges to include LHC requirements. Ongoing.
607.4: ALL to contribute to the OSC Project Status Report. Ongoing.
607.5: DB to contribute Introduction for OSC report. Ongoing
607.6: DB & PC to contribute Wider Context for OSC report. Ongoing
607.7: GS and AS to contribute Tier1 Status Report for OSC report. Ongoing.
607.8: JC to contribute Deployment Status for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.9: RJ to contribute ATLAS User Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.10: DC to contribute LHCb User Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.
607.11: SL (and Tom Whytnie) to contribute Impact and Dissemination Report for OSC Report. Ongoing.
608.1: AS will consider spend requirements to meet increased 2017 and 2018 pledges and circulate to PMB this week.
608.2: DB will forward OSC comments to PG from last time.