GridPP PMB Meeting 650

GridPP PMB Meeting 650 (13.11.17)
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Present: Dave Britton(Chair), Tony Cass, Pete Clarke, Pete Gronbech, Roger Jones, Steve Lloyd, Andrew McNab, Gareth Smith, Louisa Campbell (Minutes).

Apologies: Jeremy Coles, David Colling, Tony Doyle, Dave Kelsey, Andrew Sansum.

1. 2018 OC Date Change
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The OC meeting date has been changed after DB and PC’s discussions with Rob Jones at CERN last week revealed the HNSciCloud project meeting clashes with the previously proposed dates. It was decided to move the OC meeting in order to ensure we are seen to be integrated and aware of what is taking place in HNSciCloud. A doodle poll has been established to set up a new date [Note added: Now March 12th). DB stressed preparations should continue as planned. Q2 report from JC (reliant upon receipt of information) and financial and manpower information from AS are still awaited. Q3 reports are now due so PG is pursuing this and Q4 also need to be submitted well in advance of the OC meeting. PG may look at the Q2 reports to assist JC and Tier1 submissions should be addressed

2. Accounting portal
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DB raised this at GDB meeting last week and has been invited to contact the developer direct with concerns. The bookmarking issue appears to have been addressed and DB invited input from PMB before he contacts the developer.

3. WLCG Management board meetings
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These have frequently been postponed and meet irregularly. There was a recent suggestion on the mailing list to reduce these to 6 per annum instead of 12. DB is not in favour of this and suggested the current schedule of MB meetings continues but around a more well-defined set of standing items in order to ensure information is regularly communicated. This week’s MB meeting will go ahead in order to discuss this proposal.

4. AOCB
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None

5. Standing Items
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SI-0 Bi-Weekly Report from Technical Group (DC)
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AM noted technical meeting was held on Friday where storage was discussed as well as cacheing and security operations activity.

SI-1 ATLAS Weekly Review and Plans (RJ)
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Nothing significant to report.

SI-2 CMS Weekly Review and Plans (DC)
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DC was not present and no report submitted.

SI-3 LHCb Weekly Review and Plans (PC)
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AM noted there was discussion on the CNAF flooding issue; unfortunately, the second copy of some LHCb data was at Glasgow where there has been a downtime. At Glasgow the Air conditioning failed and the alarm system was being moved and therefore not fully operational. This has now been resolved. AM noted plans are in place to deal with replicas in the future if issues arise as this may take months to deal with.

SI-4 Production Manager’s report (JC)
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JC was not present and no report submitted.

SI-5 Tier-1 Manager’s Report (GS)
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Echo:
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– Re-distribution of data in Echo onto the 2015 capacity hardware is now complete. There are now 8PBytes of usable space in Echo. However, there is some data rebalancing to be done before upping the quotas so the VOs can make use of the extra space.

Services:
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– The “Test” FTS service (used by Atlas) has been enabled for dual stack IPv4/IPv6. The plan is to extend this to the “Production” FTS service this week.

Castor:
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– The Tier1 Castor tape servers have all been upgraded to run SL7.
– There was a problem with the CMS Castor instance on Tuesday 7th November when one of the Castor headnode systems failed (with a CPU failure). The node was replaced and the service resumed during the afternoon.
– This week we have a Castor outage for Security patching plus a separate intervention to upgrade the SRMs for LHCb.

Network:
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– We experienced a partial network failure on Wednesday (8th) for around 15 minutes when one of the routers in the core site network failed. GS confirmed this was a 15 minute fail – access from the office to Tier1 was not operating but the effect on operations was minimal. A report noted a router had failed and was removed – GS is currently investigating.

Purchasing:
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– Expect tender for disk capacity to go out today or tomorrow. CPU order is a week or so behind. There is a 3 week timescale for response on tenders, this is behind the scheduled dates for this year which was intended for August which leaves us in a similar position as previous years. We will make target but it will be challenging. DB noted concern over this delay as could lead to failure in the future.

SI-6 LCG Management Board Report of Issues (DB)
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No report this week.

SI-7 External Contexts (PC)
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DB referred to a phone meeting with Susan Morrell last week as a follow up to the Cloud meeting that DB, AS and PC attended recently in London. DB was not on the mailing list but PC joined the meeting and DB spoke to Charlotte Jamieson this morning who advised the meeting was to determine what happens next and they are commissioning consultants to write a report on the UK research community’s position with respect to Cloud going forward. Susan will update her circulation list to ensure DB receives emails in the future.

REVIEW OF ACTIONS
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644.2: PG and AS will document plans and costings for the remainder of GridPP5 taking account of the Oracle tape issues experienced. (Update: a draft will be produced before Christmas). Ongoing.
644.3: AS put together a starting plan for staff ramp-down. (Update: a draft will be produced before Christmas). Ongoing.
644.4: AS will progress capture of funds for Dirac with Mark Wilkinson. Ongoing.
644.6: (during GridPP39 meeting) DB will ascertain what Biomed do and how they use the Grid. (Update: Holloway then Manchester and Imperial are biggest representatives – DC emailed to ascertain whether our input is being explicitly credited and was advised that GridPP has to sign up to something LSGC SLA in order to be acknowledged. (https://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=2874). SL will check and sign up to this. Done.
647.1: PC will update Data Management Plan. Ongoing.

647.2: DB will circulate link for Data Management Plan once agreed. Ongoing.
649.1: DB will write Introduction of OS documents. Ongoing.
649.2: PC will write Wider Context of OS documents. Ongoing.
649.3: PG will schedule a discussion of the Risk Register at a PMB meeting in December then update this in the OS documents. Ongoing.
649.4: GS and AS will write the Tier1 Status section of OS documents. Ongoing.
649.5: JC will write Deployment Status section of OS documents with input from PG. Ongoing.
649.6: RJ, DK and AS will write LHC section of User Reports in OS documents. Ongoing.
649.7: JC will write Other Experiments section of User Reports in OS documents with input from DC and PG. Ongoing.

ACTIONS AS OF 13.11.17
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644.2: PG and AS will document plans and costings for the remainder of GridPP5 taking account of the Oracle tape issues experienced. (Update: a draft will be produced before Christmas). Ongoing.
644.3: AS put together a starting plan for staff ramp-down. (Update: a draft will be produced before Christmas). Ongoing.
644.4: AS will progress capture of funds for Dirac with Mark Wilkinson. Ongoing.
647.1: PC will update Data Management Plan. Ongoing.