Speaker
C. ARNAULT
(CNRS)
Description
One of the most important problems in software management of a very
large and complex project such as Atlas is how to deploy the software
on the running sites. By running sites we include computer sites
ranging from computing centers in the usual sense down to individual
laptops but also the computer elements of a computing grid
organization. The deployment activity consists in constructing a well
defined representation of the states of the working software (known as
releases), and transporting them to the target sites, in such a way
that the installation process can be entirely automated and can take
care of discovering the context and adapting itself to it. A set of
tools based on both CMT - the basic configuration management tool of
ATLAS - and Pacman has been developed. The resulting mechanism now
supports the systematic production of distribution kits for various
binary conditions of every release, the partial or complete automatic
installation of kits on any site and the running of test suites to
validate the installed kits. This mechanism is meant to be fully
compliant with the Grid requirements and has been tested in the
context of LCG. Several issues related with the constraints on the
target system, or with the incremental updates of the installation
still need to be studied and will be discussed.
