Latest revision as of 14:37, 15 January 2014

For slides see Indico agenda: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=272795

Welcome - Michel Jouvin

• See slides for future (pre-)GDB planning and WLCG workshop details
• CNAF Bologna will host the March GDB
• Early July for next WLCG workshop? Volunteers to host it?
• February pre-GDB will be Ops Coord F2F meeting
• VO based SAM tests difficult to prioritise. Timeouts not really errors and should not be counted as failure of the site.
  • SAM test are not planned to use pilot jobs.
  • Proposal to run critical tests with VO's lcgadmin role so sites can prioritise them.
  • Other tests run with normal role but not counted as critical.
  • Discussion about problem of prioritising:
    • Would be easier if SAM tests could run in pilot framework.
    • As long as experiments publish results into SAM framework then ok.
    • Is it useful to still publish availability/reliability?
    • Need to schedule a proper discussion of this.

Accounting Update - John Gordon and Stuart Pullinger

See slides for details

APEL status and plans:

• 30 April 2014 is end of security updates for EMI2 APEL client
• Portal will support new EMI3 features later this year (eg summary by submithost)
• Migration is complicated by change of database schema. Instructions provided. Not just a Yum update!
• Have to do upgrade on a month boundary.
• Data retention policy: UserDN records just kept for 18 months.
• EGI-Inspire ends in April 2014.
• Accounting continues as a funded core activity.

Storage accounting (StAR):

• DPM and dCache released StAR publishers in EMI3
• Use SSM to publish to APEL at RAL, same method as for CPU
• Working with 3 sites in November
• More sites looked at and this turned up some flaws in assumptions, going back to developers for fixes
• Portal has implemented similar view to CPU
• Italian tests with getting info from BDII and republish via StAR
  • Supports sites that don't use a supported storage system

Cloud accounting:

• EGI Federated Cloud activity
• Create Cloud Usage Record from VMM and use SSM to send to APEL
• Scripts for OpenNebula, StratusLab, OpenStack
• Need to decide how to combine grid and cloud data, depends on benchmarking, assumptions etc

GOCDB postscript:

• GocDB 5.2 will allow site managers to add custom key properties
• All sites with a particular value can be found

Volunteer Computing @CERN

Status of LHC@home and outlook for wider use of BOINC - Nils Hoimyr

• What about Protected Application Environment and BOINC/VirtualBox?
  • Means can't run as a service, and always need current user's cooperation
  • Latest version of BOINC and Virtualbox fix this

LHCb's first steps in volunteer computing - Federico Stagni

• Got it to work at Ferrara using dedicated accounts and autogenerated passwords as a way round Virtualbox vs service problem
• Discussion:
  • suggestion to use automatic CVMFS squid location procedure
  • backfill ideas for multicore might be relevant for volunteer machines

Actions in Progress

• OpsCoord Report - Josep Flix
  • See slides for details of future meetings and task forces
  • WMS Decommissioning, Multicore Deployment, Middleware Readiness TFs started
  • Discussion: Will Savannah -> JIRA happen? Must happen because Savannah will be closed eventually. Aim still to do this during LS1.

• OpenSSL Issue - Maarten Litmaath
  • Detailed analysis of how this problem became known in the slides
  • New GridSite creates 1024 bit proxy keys by default, rather than 512 bit
    • Used by WMS, CREAM, UI, FTS-3, PanDA, ...
  • New RPMs available as of 16 December 2013, EGI Broadcast then
  • Need to update services which use GridSite
  • Discussion: what about going to 2048 keys now so don't have this again? might break other things.

• EGI News - Peter Solagna
  • Three slides:
  • SHA-2 readiness/usage
  • Increase availability/reliability per-month thresholds?
    • Availability average: 70%, increased to 80%
    • Reliaibility average: 75%, increased to 85%
    • Need to fail three months in a row to risk suspension
  • Security contacts verification
    • Some semi-automated procedure
    • Could do for other contacts in GOCDB too

Toward a new HEPSPEC Benchmark - Michele Michelotto

Work plan to prepare a new HEPSPEC benchmark after the release of SPEC14

• Not open source; site licensed as with HEPSPEC06
• Spec CPU2014 by the end of the year? As basis for HS14
  • Preliminary kit closed source too
• Discussion:
  • why not choose something open source? eg weighted Geant4 floating point/data structure performance?
  • vendors more familiar with Spec-based benchmarks
  • would an alternative be portable?

EGI Plans - Peter Solagna

• See slides for details of clouds, outreach, and AAI plans
• EGI-InSPIRE extension of core services to end of 2014 (see last GDB)
• Discussion: H2020 plans? Most of these topics are relevant to H2020 calls

Using DAVIX for HTTP data access - Adrien Devresse

Status of the DAVIX library and its integration into tools like ROOT to enable http access to data

• In the ROOT trunk, and included if you install the relevant data management subpackage
• GFAL2 uses DAVIX for HTTP; installed by installing GFAL base package
• DAVIX uses patched libneon WebDAV client, and wraps it

Cloud pre-GDB summary - Michel Jouvin

Discussion about conclusions in the slides:

• Are we staying with CPU time or going to wallclock time?
  • Not decided
  • We are collecting both
• Are we allowing overcommiting?
  • Not decided
• Batch queues needed for VOs that don't run their own queue of tasks

Next pre-GDB on this probably in Spring

Andrew's notes on pre-GDB on Cloud Issues, 14 Jan 2014

See http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=272783 for links to slides

Cloud accounting

• APEL accounting - John Gordon: (slides on Indico)
  • EGI Federated Cloud work on extracting info for APEL
  • Still at the level of getting a few sites working
  • Just another source of data to APEL (cf OSG)
  • How to merge grid and cloud accounting? Normalisation/benchmarking

• WC time vs. CPU time, consistency with grid & How to evaluate/publish HS06 of VMs
  • Difficult to measure and even define performance
  • Just when X VMs per machine, run X VMs with benchmark?

• Conclusions?
  • Same info in machinesfeatures as goes into accounting
  • Measure CPU and wall clock.
  • Pledges based on wallclock, so users do not sit on idle VMs.

Security/traceability issues

• Need for identity switching, in particular for data access?

• Vincent's slides on Indico
  • Site or VO responsible for logging and traceability?
  • User seperation by unix UID per user?
  • Need to use glexec? Or just adduser and sudo?
  • What about security updates? Who is responsible? Site or VO?
  • Will be questionaire from security team

• Conclusions?
  • In VM, different unix UID for each user (or job?)

Target shares in clouds

• Experience feedback
  • See Randall's slides in Indico
  • Have ability to fair share but not tested extensively
  • Doesn't expose that it's a cloud to the VO
  • A virtual condor pool, built of VMs
  • Going to test with Amazon EC2

• VAC-like approach in clouds?
  • Modify user instance quotas depending on target shares and "pressure" of requests for VMs from VOs
  • How about creating VMs that are overquota with a shorter lifetime so get turnover? Underquota create with long life.

Wrap-Up

• Workplan, milestones
  • Summary during GDB tomorrow
  • Next meeting spring? 3-4 months