LCG Bulletin

Grid Deployment Board (GDB)
Web - Wiki - Agendas - Minutes

7 November 2007 - GB Meeting - Agenda

The main topics of the GDB in November were the report on the VOM(R)S Workshop, the progress on the Job Priorities implementations, Operational Security and Authorization issues, the status of Middleware Services on SL4 and the discussion about Pilot Jobs and the usage of glexec at the Tier-1 sites following the decisions of the WLCG Management Board.

6 November 2007 - Pre-GDB Meeting - Agenda

CCRC 2008 Planning - The planning sessions focused on the resource requirements and targets of the Experiments for the February's and May's challenges. Initial milestones were discussed and the goal is now to collect explicit service requirements from for the Tier-0 and Tier-1 sites.

GSSD Meeting - The topics discussed were: SRM v2.2 deployment in production: implications for the Experiments. Organization of Support for Storage through GGUS. Summary on Glue for SRM v2.2 in production. Feedback from NDGF with dCache 1.8 in production. Organization of Support for Storage in OSG

5 November 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

Update 35 for gLite 3.0 - The update 35 for gLite 3.0 has been released to the EGEE Grid production service. The main enhancements and bug fixes include updates to APEL, GIN and glite-info-generic.

Upgrade Policy Proposed - The Central Europe ROC proposed a procedure to enhance the interaction between sites and SA3 during the deployment of new services on SLC4.

Scheduled Downtime Procedures - A collaboration was started between the CIC and GOC teams in order to improve the new automatic procedure for announcing scheduled downtimes. 

New Security SAM Test - A new security test, aimed at avoiding the deployment of publicly executable scripts in shared areas on the WNs has been developed and it is currently being validated.

Lcg-CE on SL4 - The SLC4 compatible version of the lcg-CE was successfully deployed in PPS. The release to production is scheduled for the following week.

29 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

Issues with 32 and 64 bits hosts -  IN2P3 reported issues running the latest batch workers (8 cores, 16 GB RAM) with 32 bit operating systems as required by gLite middleware. The EGEE plan is to provide 32 bit libraries within the 64 bit release to allow 32 applications to run.

Update 5 for gLite 3.1 - A new production release of gLite 3.1 (update 5) was made this week. Link

EOL of SL3 - The End of Life (EOL) for SLC3 (not SL3) was discussed. Still 65  SubClusters in the EGEE grid are advertising SLC3 as operating system.

22 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

Changes to Downtimes Notifications - Site downtimes entered in the GOCDB will now generate a broadcast describing the site's downtime. Interested parties can choose to receive the downtime broadcasts selectively  via email or RSS.

New CERN UI Default - The default UI available from CERN's interactive lxplus service is now gLite 3.1, and not 3.0 any longer.

Gstat Errors - Errors are showing in Gstat that do not reflect the production deployment of the Glue 1.3 schema. 

15 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

PIC Report - PIC reported a number of issues and questions about jobs being submitted to them by the Experiments supported (ATLAS, CMS and LHCb).

ROOT 5.17/04 Released - Released ROOT version 5.17/04. Rene will present the new developments in the next AA meeting.

SEAL Plug-in Manager - LHCb asked about the status for discontinuing the SEAL plug-in manager. The proposal is to move the milestone to March 2008.

4 October 2007 - Minutes

Configurations 53c and 53d Released - Configuration LCG_53c was released with the new version of GFAL 1.10.2. LCG_53d will we released next week with the changes needed by ATLAS and CMS in CORAL and POOL.

Proposal of ROOT Schema Evolution - The proposal to support complex schema evolution in ROOT has been circulated by the Experiments to their experts. Meetings to discuss concrete use cases are going to be organized soon.

Management Board (MB)
Web - Wiki - Members - Agendas - Minutes

6 November 2007 - Agenda

ATLAS Quarterly Report and Plans - D.Barberis summarized the ATLAS activities and achievements until October 2007 and he also outlined their plans until the start of the LHC in 2008.

LHCb Quarterly Report and Plans - U.Marconi presented the LHCb activities i the results achieved n 2007. He then described the  plans for the coming months and LHCb's expectations from the CCRC'08 challenges.

WLCG Policy on Pilot Jobs - The Management Board discussed and agreed the the WLCG policy and constraints in order to allow the usage of pilot jobs submitting work on behalf of third parties at the sites.

SRM Roll-Out and CCRC Planning Updates - J.Shiers presented the weekly update on the SRM deployment at the Tier-1 Sites and the planning work in  preparation of the CCRC’08 challenges.

30 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

Job Priorities Update - I. Bird summarized the status of the Job Priorities implementations. The tests on the certification system have been passed and the setup on the Pre-Production System (PPS) at CERN is complete on SL4 and using the LCG CE component.

ALICE Quarterly Report - Y.Schutz presented the ALICE Quarterly Report for 2007Q3. The ALICE Physics Data Challenge 2007 (PDC07) showed excellent stability of the central services. And the future activities will focus on the preparation of the ALICE Full Dress Rehearsal and CCRC'08.

SRM Roll-Out and CCRC Planning Updates - H.Renshall summarized the weekly progress on the SRM roll-out at the Tier-1 sites and the preparation of the CCRC’08 challenges.

23 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

NDGF Site Reliability Tests - D.Collados presented the work that is being done in order to add to SAM monitoring of the services provided by NDGF. The goal is to develop availability tests at NDGF that are equivalent to those executed at the other WLCG Sites.

Pilots Jobs Overview - J.Gordon introduced the discussion on the usage of pilot jobs and the implementation that can be obtained using “glexec”. In preparation of the MB meeting of the 6 November. 

SRM Roll-Out and CCRC Planning Updates - H.Renshall presented the weekly update on the SRM Roll-out at the Tier-1 Sites and the preparation of the CCRC’08 challenges.

16 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

Report from EGI Workshop - J.Knobloch presented a summary of the European Grid Initiative (EGI) Workshop in Budapest and other information on EGI. The current work is focusing on the setup and the operations of the new organizational model of a sustainable pan-European grid infrastructure.

Sites Reliability September 2007 - A.Aimar briefly commented the Site Reliability Reports for September 2007.

CCRC Planning Update - J.Shiers summarized the weekly CCRC’08 phone meeting held on the day before. The goals of the first meeting were to start working on a first draft of a combined scheduled and combined goals (as started in the CMS CSA08 description). Initial identification of key (existing) services for February

9 October 2007 - Agenda, Minutes

CCRC 2008 Organization - J.Shiers presented the initial organization of the Combined Computing Readiness Challenge 2008 that will take place in February and May 2008. The goal is to run a common challenge, simultaneously with all LHC Experiments, in order to demonstrate the readiness of the WLCG Computing infrastructure at a scale comparable to the data-taking rates foreseen for in 2008.

Grid Security and Site Operations Policy Approved - The Management Board approved two security documents proposed by D.Kelsey regarding site operations and general grid security.

Report on Benchmarking at CNAF - M.Michelotto reported the results of the CPU benchmarking tests conducted at CNAF during the Summer. The performance of HEP applications were compared with the SPECint 2000 and 2006 benchmarks in order to understand how to estimate and re-scale the SPECint values.

CPU Usage Efficiency  - T.Cass presented statistics data about the low efficiency of the jobs running a the WLCG sites. The problems discussed is that the applications seem to use only 50-60% of the CPU power available at the Sites. Improving such efficiency would allow better usage of the resources available thus considerable savings.

LHCC Comprehensive Review Preparation - The agenda and the presentations for the LHCC Comprehensive Review (19-20 November 2007) are being agreed and a first proposal is now available. Link