Summary of CCRC08 planning conference call of Jan 21 2008

The meeting was chaired by J.Shiers with notes taken by H.Renshall.
The agenda with attached material is at
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=26870
and the associated Twiki is at
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LCG/WLCGCommonComputingReadinessChallenges

Representatives Present: Tier0 (M.C-S), WLCG (JS, HR, MG, AA), GD (AdM),
ALICE (PM, LB), ATLAS (AdG), LHCb (RS), CNAF (LdA), FZK (AH, DR),
IN2P3 (FH), RAL (AS), NL-T1 (MvdS), PIC (GM), CMS (DB joined later)

Tier0 DB Resource Allocation for February: was presented by M.Girone
(slides attached to agenda). They have asked experiments what changes
(e.g. in DB volumes or server priorities) they will need at T0 and T1
sites for CCRC'08 and also when they expect the associated workloads
to become significant. So far they have a reply from LHCb. R.Santinelli
asked what happened to streams replication when the recent LHCb
bulk LFC changes were made - he had heard that the PIC LFC crashed.
MG said there were 10 million changes and they will analyse then
give some recipes. She will check with PIC (reported later to be an
out of memory problem from an over-large commit - now fixed).

Status of SRM v2.2: J.Shiers reported that as far as we know all T1 have
upgraded to this level. dcache sites should get version 1.8.0-12
from dcache.org (later info from P.Fuhrman - also take patches 1 and 2).

Status of client tools and and services: A.di Meglio reported some
changes to the baseline versions linked to the CCRC'08 Twiki namely
that the dpm versions are now 1.6.7-1 for slc4 and 1.6.7-2 for slc3.
He expected a new lfc to be certified today and a new gfal/lcg-utils
to become available today.

Baseline Storage Services: J.Shiers said they intend to document
known problem features, and any work-arounds, in the baseline versions
that will be used in February. The intention is to freeze the baseline
versions next week so the experiments can start to ramp up their
activities. NL-T1 reported they had problems in the gPLAZMA component
to get the dcache space manager working. JS confirmed the intention
was that next week be a baseline software stability week allowing
final experiment setting up for the 4 February start. He proposed
to organise a site by site readiness review of the Tier1. M Coelho
dos Santos for CASTOR/CERN reported they have a version 2.1.6 in test
with CMS intending to upgrade the CMS production CASTOR instance this
week. Any upgrade of the other 3 experiments would however be in the
'stability' week. There is no problem to have mixed CASTOR vesrsions
at a site and the Tier1 can stay on CASTOR 2.1.4 as CNAF and RAL have
already announced.

Update from Experiments:
There was no report from CMS (there is a CMS week in Lyon and DB joined
later). L.Betev reported for ALICE that they are looking at directory
structures to deploy their CCRC'08 space requirements and are in
contact with all of their sites. They were not sure of the availibility
of the CASTOR xrootd plugin at CNAF. M.CdS said that there is a plugin
for both the 2.1.4 and 2.1.6 versions of CASTOR and that a
version with fixes for ALICE is under test. He recommended CNAF install
the current plugin since a later upgrade is then easy.

Schedule and Metrics:
J.Shiers gave an overview of his paper (attached to the agenda).
The schedule for February is very tight, March includes the Easter
holiday then in April there is a WLCG collaboration workshop at CERN.
The intention is to use the April face-to-face CCRC'08 meeting to
decide on the software releases to be used in May with the target
date for deployment of April 15.
For the February run we have three sets of metrics - the scaling factors
for the experiment functional blocks which we expect them to monitor
and report on, the problem resolution targets of the experiment critical
services (note scalability such as of streams replication does not have
a target) and the MoU site and service availibility targets. These latter
two will be followed by the daily and weekly CCRC meetings. JS said he
was worried there are some services with no February targets leaving
only the May run to attempt to reach them. He requested experiments to
give complete metrics for everything they want to test in their
functional blocks for next Monday's meeting. We will continue the
Tuesday to Friday daily meetings in February but merge the weekly CCRC'08
planning meeting into the EGEE operations meeting (16.00 on Mondays).
We encourage the Tier1 to join the daily meeting, usually less than 15
minutes, then will resume this weekly CCRC'08 planning conference call
in March.

AOB:
For CMS D.Bonacorsi said that the information systems were still not
publishing enough information on sites spaces for CMS needs. JS
promised to raise this at the MB tomorrow.
L.Betev for ALICE confirmed they had circulated all their Tier1 space
requirements and agreed to link this information into the CCRC'08 Twiki.
For PIC G.Merino reported they were having problems deploying new cpu
capacity in blade servers. They would very much like to know the number
of batch job slots they are expected to provide per experiment as already
documented by LHCb. JS will bring this to the MB.
Finally JS announced the intention to update the baseline software versions
list on Wednesday and that there will be a last weekly CCRC'08 planning
meeting before the February run on next Monday, 28 January.