Speaker
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
PnP UI is released in TAR and AFS versions: it can be used inside
a shell just
running an init script or with an active AFS client, or
downloading the tar
package containing the middleware. Although PnP UI is intended to
be used by
any not-root user of any RedHat platform, however the RPMs
absence has
made also possible to extend the scripting procedure for a
configuration by root
in order to enable PnP UI for all the user of a certain server
node. This
operation can be useful on an e-mail server. User configuration
values can be
easily set on a text file for all the types of PnP UI access: in
the TAR version the
configuration file is contained in the package, in the AFS and
root version it
appears automatically in the user home directory. PnP UI is
tested on Scientific
Linux, but exploiting the experience of the users, it has been
made compliant
with Fedora and Debian. It is totally integrated with gLite
middleware.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
The diffusion of the PnP UI can help to extend the grid user
community and
integrate in the EGEE infrastructure new and different
applications (also easily
including in the UI PnP the required libraries). It fulfils
security requirements
both on the user side and on the grid managers checking the right
proxy
details. During each user access, PnP UI also updates usage data
collected on
a Storage Element for statistics. The user easily can set grid
services required
by a Virtual Organizations(VO).
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
The development activity of the PnP UI is intended to easily
extend all the grid
advantages to wide and fast increasing communities. As it can be
enabled on
different RedHat platform without root privileges, the user can
skip some
disadvantages related to the classic UI: contacting a site
manager to ask for an
account on existing User Interface; transferring his data on an
external and
shared machine with necessary limits of storage space;
compromising the
management and the privacy of his scientific, technical or
business data; risking
to slow down his work because of high user traffic on the shared UI.
PnP UI supports high potential diffusion among grid users also
because the
RPM absence makes it easily customized to be compliant with
different systems.
If libraries are missing on any RedHat platform or required for
specific
applications, they can be easily added without changing the
previous system
configuration.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
PlugAndPlay User Interface(PnP UI) is a set of scripts allowing
to access grid
resources by any scientific/technical community in a simple and
comfortable
way, and with a valid proxy certificate. It is provided as a
simple unique
directory with all the required files, scripts and library, it
doesn't require root
privileges and can be used in AFS context. It was tested on the
major Linux
distributions. PnP UI can be configured by the final user through
a text file to
set required grid services.
