BiLD-Dev
Bi-Weekly "Loyal" DIRAC developers meeting. And, following, the LHCbDIRAC developers meeting.
Zoom: BiLD
https://cern.zoom.us/j/62504856418?pwd=TU1kb01SOFFpSDBJeWVBdU9qemVXQT09
Meeting ID: 62504856418
Passcode: 12345678
BiLD – 13/11/2025
At CERN: Federico, Christophe, Christopher, Ryun, Alexandre
On Zoom: Ueda, Daniela, Hideki, Alexei, Natthan, Andrei, Mazen, Jorge, Xiaomei, Dhiraj
Apologies:
Previous meetings
- Last BiLD was 3 weeks ago
DIRAC communities roundtable
LHCb:
Federico+Christopher+Christophe+Alexandre+Ryun
- Updated to proper (LHCb)DIRAC and (lhcb)DiracX releases

- We finally solved issues with CS becoming unavailable
- “solved” by having a load balancer (external to DIRAC) in front of the CS slaves. Just a machine installing HAProxy. DIRAC’s balancer exposes issues when there’s a high load
- Andrei+Xiaomei saw in Juno similar issue, maybe this could be applied there too
- “solved” by having a load balancer (external to DIRAC) in front of the CS slaves. Just a machine installing HAProxy. DIRAC’s balancer exposes issues when there’s a high load
Belle2
Hideki, Ueda, Dhiraj
- Scalability issues: MySQL. Probably caused by many short jobs
- Andrei there are plots for jobs/second executed that could be useful for you
- there’s an overhead for starting jobs so should avoid running 1-minute jobs
- Switching VOMS, also KEK CAs.
- from previous meeting Found some
stomprelated issues, will check if already signaled, if not will create a new one
Juno+BES3:
Xiaomei
- Some bottleneck issues lately, many small jobs hammering the CS and MySQL, and the disk where Sandboxes are located
- Andrei added few CS slaves
- For Sandboxes --> the main way forward is use DiracX and S3 for sandbox store
- Forced to use Multi-hop. Mostly successfull, but issues reported
- Christophe saw the issues, will look at it soon
EGI
Andrei
- Smooth running. Chasing sites to update the configuration (VOMS, tokens, etc)
- Created GreenDIRAC extension for keeping related developments: GreenReportingAgent, energy consumption by jobs tool (Mazen)
- Submitting energy metrics for each job into the DB
- Started a GreenSiteDirector
- work in progress, for submitting to sites that have a lower energy footprint
- Got functional D9/Dx0.0.1 certification installation (Bertrand):
- DIRAC9 host + 2 hosts k3s cluster for DiracX + S3/minIO
- Chris+Federico should not run on 2. Better 1 or 3
- Opensearch with certificate authentication
- will contribute to DiracX for this
- IAM dev IdP, failed with dteam IAM, Check-In in progress
- wants to add also a MQ
- DIRAC9 host + 2 hosts k3s cluster for DiracX + S3/minIO
GridPP:
Daniela, Simon
- No change in production.
- DIRACx investigation slow, mainly due to Daniela being pre-occupied with other things.
- Could we at some point in the meeting have a quick look at: https://github.com/DIRACGrid/diracx/discussions/700 (“CS repo directory problems in container deployment”)
Topics from GitHub discussions and bots
Releases
DIRAC
- v8.0.76
- no new releases since July
- v9.0.6
- Configuration
- CHANGE: (#8353) add PreferredURLPatterns to pilot.json
- FrameworkSystem
- NEW: (#8328) allow for multiple client per provider
- DataManagementSystem
- NEW: (#8328) FTS3 gets tokens directly
- Configuration
Issues (still there?):
- from previous meeting https://github.com/conda-forge/dirac-grid-feedstock/issues/170 https://github.com/conda-forge/dirac-grid-feedstock/issues/169
- cburr will take care of these ASAP
DiracX
- v0.0.2
- created 3 weeks ago
Release planning, tests and certification
-
Shall we use immutable releases?
- done for DIRAC and DiracX
-
Upgrade to v9+0.0.1:
- Federico I have not touched the guide in the last 2 or 3 weeks, any more advise? Anyone else tried it out?
-
Certification machines
- Federico I have been asked to add CMS VO there, with just 1 user.
*dteamwill be enough- Andrei CMS could go in EGI, even
- Federico I have been asked to add CMS VO there, with just 1 user.
-
Next hackathon(s)
- Next week, for real this time
DIRAC projects
DIRAC:
Issues by milestone:
- v8.0:
- We added a workaround for ARC CEs (ARC bug)
- from previous meeting
- Add config option to prevent some groups from cleaning transformations
- Federico assigned to me, can I assign to someone from Juno?
- Don’t block the transformation system if owner is removed
- Xiaomei to give more details
- RucioFileCatalogClient.setMetadata returns empty result on success
- Add config option to prevent some groups from cleaning transformations
- from previous meeting v9.0:
- Job Pre/Post processing flexibility
- actually working for this in the CWL prototype
- Andrei we would actually need to add plugins
- Job Pre/Post processing flexibility
- v9.1:
- Nothing new
- Propagate number of processors from Transformations or Productions down to Jobs description
- Put as reminder, does not seem something we’ll actually solve in DIRAC
- Gracefully stopping pilots #8346
- requires some discussion
- Get infos from CRIC
- any volunteer?
- from previous meeting Proposal for input data resolution format
- also cited in https://github.com/aldbr/dirac-cwl-proto/issues/25
- from previous meeting Replacement for BDII2CSAgent #8194
- “nice” discussion

- 17th July
- recent answers in the GGUS ticket above from AP seems to point in the right direction
- nevertheless, Federico is trying to grab info on if we can do a “CEs” crawler ourselves. ARC CEs seem to provide the necessary information, issues are from HTCondorCEs
- This has now been discussed in the GridPP project management board. Conclusion was unfortunately “input from GOCDB team needed”
- 09 Oct 2025 GridPP ops team asked UK sites to implement Alessandro’s suggestion. The following issues were observed:
-
It’s not documented (beyond a soon-to-be-archived broadcast)
-
Free form encourages typos and misremembered VO names (vo.na62.gridpp.ac.uk vs na62.vo.gridpp.ac.uk) – this would not happen with predefined scopes
-
RAL as the Tier 1 hit the length limit for extension as it supports too many VOs
-
Sigh.
- Last message from Federico:
For those of you who are running a HTCondor CE, would you mind investigating if the content of auth-map + accounting-map files could be made public? Maybe we are lucky and it’s a trivial thing to be done.
- Daniela This has gone to the HTCondor developers via RAL, but so far no answer.
-
- 13th Nov New updates in https://helpdesk.ggus.eu/#ticket/zoom/3427
- “nice” discussion
PRs discussed:
- fix: use cachedmethod instead of cached for methods #8361
- why still a draft? should then be applied also to the scitag PR
- [9.0] feat: SSHCE export inputs/import outputs as a JSON file to handle more jobs in parallel #8362
- draft but hotfixed in LHCb
- [9.0] Avoid endless loop in MonitoringReporter #8363
- just a question to answer in there
- feat: verify CS config commit using diracx model validation #8351
- This is ready (?)
- [9.0] Subprocess: use psutil for killing processes #8359
- This is ready – needs careful review
- [9.0] Use DIRACX_CA_PATH to communicate to diracx and S3 #8364
- from previous meeting PoolCE and RAM (issue raised in https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/issues/7853#issuecomment-2948565279): https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/pull/8232
- Federico made progresses, ready to be reviewed since last week. The logic in there shoud be checked
- Andrei matching done with tags, which is not ideal – there is also a limit on the number of tags that we can use.
- cburr should really use MB instead of GB
- from previous meeting add scitag support
- “re-written” and ready to merge
WebApp:
- Created v6.0.0 version
Pilot:
- PR for removing Python2 support re-created (previous one introduced a bug)
- will be merged into
masterafter a DIRAC(X) hackathon - from previous meeting if you really want to keep py2 support, there’a tag
- will be merged into
- PR for using the PreferredURL pattern
- ready (finally also tests are all passing)
DIRACOS:
- NTR
Documentation:
- from previous meeting tasks: https://github.com/search?q=org%3ADIRACGrid is%3Aissue state%3Aopen label%3Adocumentation &type=issues
- including some for diracx-charts and diracx-web
- Andrei Need documentation on how releases are made
management
- Having again issues for
/cvmfs/dirac.egi.eu(the syncing was not happening, ticketed, etc.). No monitoring on their side, urgent need to move out. - from previous meeting new
/cvmfs/dirac.cern.chrepository created – CERN ticket- action on cburr to populate it (using LHCb “machinery”)
DB12
- NTR
- from previous meeting Federico “I asked Igor if he wanted to become one if not the main maintainer”
- revived https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DB12/issues/9
- create https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DB12/issues/15 and made a suggestion that can be accepted
- PR https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DB12/pull/16 created – will wait for Alexandre for review
- from previous meeting We should agree on a strategy on how to do things here, as PRs can’t just be merged:
- there are reports created that depend from it, merging/releasing on a random Tuesday is not the way to go
- can we have parallel benchmarks? not clear actually if that’s doable
- Federico maybe create a “2026” release?
- we should see if there would be time for that
Rucio
- from previous meeting CTAO submitted draft PR https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/pull/8327 and issue https://github.com/DIRACGrid/dirac/issues/8331
- 23 Oct 25 Federico I asked Cedric to review these and other Rucio issues/PRs, but “no time”.
Tests
- NTR
DiracX:
- dependabot alert for web
- N interesting TR
Issues and Discussions
- CS repo directory problems in container deployment #700
- How to use
LocalGitConfigSource? - Chris and Chris will answer on this ASAP
- How to use
- There are several “Good first issues” looking for volunteers
PRs discussed:
- Renovate version maintenance for Autorest client generation #699
- feat (Configuration): add documentation to CS attributes; sub_from_preferred_username uses cache #696
-
- 2 other PRs for generating documentation. 2 of them ready for merge.
-
- from previous meeting Alembic and triggers
- asked Cedric to review it
- from previous meeting Add pilot management: create/delete/patch and query #570
- PR looks OK-ish to merge (should not affect existing running code)
- from previous meeting feat: deploy gubbins images #527
- Federico I rebased it but still failing
CWL prototype
- “moving” with full plan in https://codimd.web.cern.ch/tUL0IUMKT56tsNv3dAf65w?view.
- 8 people working on it, try to use SCRUM
DiracX-charts:
- from previous meeting Moved to fixed versions in diracx/values.yaml and added automatic chart version bumping on DiracX releases
- Similarly should be done for diracx-web
DiracX-web:
- NTR
Next appointments
-
Meetings:
- Should be DIRAC(X) cert hackathon in 1 week
- BiLD: in 2 weeks
-
WS/hackathons/conferences:
- DiracX hackathon 21st-22nd January 2026: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1582395/
AOB
-
It’s again CHEP abstract submission time, deadline 19th December
- Dirac(X) “state of affairs” abstract? Other suggestions?
- Federico will write down an abstract but will not go.
-
ISIMA forum 20th-21st November (students will be LHCb-hosted). Time to write down project proposals – ideas?
- Federico+ChrisB+Alexandre writing down a proposal for a new Jobs Matching mechanism for DiracX: https://codimd.web.cern.ch/eOU4kV3jRTSSJq43FXvhwg#
- idea would be that student prepares a prototype for stress tests (e.g. 10M jobs in queue, how fast can we match?)
- (new) description of job requirements to be used will need your suggestion
- Any non-LHCb have a proposal and want to be a non-official supervisor?
- Federico+ChrisB+Alexandre writing down a proposal for a new Jobs Matching mechanism for DiracX: https://codimd.web.cern.ch/eOU4kV3jRTSSJq43FXvhwg#
-
from previous meeting DIRAC as an “HSF affiliated project” : https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/projects/affiliated.html
- 13th Nov 2025 no news, but in the meantime this was presented at few forums (…). In the meantime Ruslan restarted the evaluation.
LHCbDIRAC
- from previous meeting The CS in lhcbdiracx has not been updated lately because of new fields added which do not pass the validation
- so no new users in the last 10 days
- protection from that is in the works (issue in DIRAC attached to Natthan)
- from previous meeting The CS overloading is still on-the-edge, needs Pilots to respect the
PreferredURLregex
* - Several MRs in the system, reminders to update the existing ones and check what’s actually ready for merge
- Bookkeeping
- We should change the passwords of our dirac users - new should be at least 15 characters long
- from previous meeting
- First priority is the repartition, that will happen either the last week of October or the first of November. After that, the existing PRs will be evaluated
- add materialized view for processing paths optimization
- this should be merged first and the next ones use it
- Alexey it does not work for me, see comment in MR
- reworked addProcessing
- reworked getproductionporcpassname
- LHCb abstracts for CHEP go in https://codimd.web.cern.ch/4mOg3RgsT1eVTnb4KT3Tuw?edit