Workplan for the first year

It is desirable to remove dependency on Globus Toolkit in the ARC CE as soon as possible in the project, and converge to industry standard solutions for data transfer.

This work will start (and hopefully will be also finalized) in the first project year.

While the GM component is tightly coupled to GridFTP, A-REX allows decoupling from it, and has no implicit dependency on Globus. However, it is quite unlikely that storage solutions will abandon GridFTP any time soon, thus ARC CE will have to be able to handle data stage in and out through this protocol, at least for backwards compatibility.

Dynamic management of RTEs by ARC CE is a popular feature request; Janitor component allows to achieve such requirements. However, it currently exists as an early prototype, and requires substantial hardening before being released. To do this, Janitor has to be deployed over the EMI testbed, and undergo similar testing procedures as other components. Discovered problems will have to be promptly fixed. It is difficult to assess at the moment how much work will it take, but it is expected Janitor to become stable enough for a release by the end of the first project year.

Development of accounting hooks in the ARC CE will depend on the overall progress in the accounting and monitoring task; at any rate, the first major EMI release is expected to come complete with accounting hooks, which means that ARC CE PT will have to implement the necessary components during the first project year.

Very important components in need of serious evolution are those responsible for ARC CE data staging. The existing model based on downloaders and uploaders has a number of shortcomings that negatively affect ARC CE throughput and is in general rather simplistic and inflexible. During the first year it is expected to deliver the proposal for a new data staging system for the ARC CE, which will replace current downloaders and uploaders. This is a pure research and development activity, not involving any maintenance at this stage. Later in the year, it is planned to start implementing the proposal.

Implementation

-- MassimoSgaravatto - 06-Sep-2010