GDB 8th July 2009

GDB at CERN last week (http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=45477). John's introduction included a brief summary of a virtualisation and multicore workshop held at CERN recently - many open questions remain. Dave Kelsey reviewed the status of various security policies: User-level accounting, VO portals and Security Incident response policies are now all under final call for comments. The VO registratation and VO management policies have now been approved. M. Litmaath gave an update on glexec/SCAS and pilot jobs: glexec code still has bugs to be addressed and more testing is needed.Integration with ARGUS (the new authZ framework) is underway. For pilot jobs the main news was that the myProxy server has now been rebuilt with support for VOMS attributes.

Chimera migration was discussed again - led by Michel Jouvin. FZK, SARA and CCIN2P3 all potentially affected by the known scaling problems with pnfs. There was disagreement about how sites arrived this close to data taking with a major update needing to be done. Jamie Shiers looked at Tier-1 performance metrics with an attempt to list four criteria (such as meeting pledged resource levels) that a Tier-1 could use to say that it is "doing ok". Andreas Unterkircher once again presented on the status of SL5. A meta-rpm that pulls in all required dependencies to run SL4 apps on SL5 64-bit has been produced and core components (e.g. POOL, COOL...) tested. Experiment testing less clear. A gLite 3.2 (SL5) UI and BDII has been released.

The afternoon concentrated on EGEE operational tools. For the overall architecture and components see https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/EGEE/MultiLevelMonitoringOverview. The main parts were 1) Regionalised SAM monitoring: infrastructure will be NGI managed. New talk of ATM (Aggregated Topology Provider) which contains topology information of projects, grid-infrastructures, sites, services etc. Some already in place but no history. Also plans for an MRDB - Metric Results Database. SAM tests will migrate to Nagios and there will be a new SAM portal. 2) Distributed GOCDB: GOCDB4 = keep central service + build a sustainable regionalised architecture. Expect a change by November. 3) gstat2.0: tightly coupled with Nagios and uses Django for webpages. Runs from any BDII. 4) Accounting: Main new concept is that of an "Accounting Data Center". Future will see "regional accounting centers" and a move towards ActiveMQ in place of R-GMA.

Installed capacity update - fewer sites publishing "zeros" for their capcity figures. Sites should now be measureing HEPSPEC2006. Sites need to upgrade CE info providers and YAIM. Finally there was a VOM(R)S working group wrap up talk: the group brought together developers of VOMS/VOMS-ADMIN and VOM(R)S.Concerns remain since many VOs use VOMS-ADMIN which is not compliant with JSPG policies and future interworking between products is dependent on individual tests.

There will probably not be an August GDB but it depends on issues arising at the STEP09 workshop.