Dirac Dictionary
Dictionary of terms which I've had to look up when working with DIRAC (by rcurrie feel free to contribute/correct)
DN - Distinguished Name. This uniquely describes the entity which this certificate was issued for. e.g. /C=DE/O=GermanGrid/OU=DESY/CN=John Doe
CN - Common Name. e.g. your name
VOMS - Virtual Organization Membership Service. http://toolkit.globus.org/grid_software/security/voms.php
WMS - Workload Managment System. The central part of the DIRAC system
CE - Computing Element. A computing resource DIRAC is able to use when running jobs. e.g. CONDOR, batch, CREAM...
SE - Storage Element. Places where data can be stored. e.g. CPPM-disk, CERN-USER, ...
DMS - Data Management System. This is the system which allows the uploading of local files to a remote Storage Element (SE) or downloading the file again.
FC - FileCatalog. Dirac catalog of file replicas and metadata. This contains the mapping of 1LFN to potentially many replicas across different SEs
SMS - Storage Managment System. I's unclear to me how this is different to the DMS...
BDII - Berkeley Database Information Index. Provides/stores information on the status of Grid services which are important. http://gridinfo.web.cern.ch/introduction
CS - Configuration Service. A (typically per-VO) service containing the configuration of various CE and SE elements on the grid.
CA - Certificate Authority.
DISET - . The communictions protocal used by DIRAC services for inter-service communication built upon RPC but expanded.
RPC - remote procedure call. Allows a program to execute something in a given address space.