Speaker
Describe the added value of the grid for your activity, or the value your tool or service adds for other grid users. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community, and the relevance for other scientific or business applications.
The double nature of service and test infrastructure of the PPS has brought, during the second phase of the EGEE project, to a significant operational complexity of the infrastructure due to the conflicting requirements of
- flexibility to fast deployment of frequent software updates
- stability as a near-production service.
This complexity, of course, translated into operational costs not sustainable in the long term.
Furthermore, it turned out that an important class of users as the WLCG experiments, with the approaching of the start-up of the accelerator, experienced increasing difficulty to interface their applications with a pre-production infrastructure which was, by design, independent and separated from the production environment. Therefore they started to use alternative solutions for their tests (e.g. experimental service instances in production)
Report on the impact of the activity, tool or service. This should include a description of how grid technology enabled or enhanced the result, or how you have enabled or enhanced the infrastructure for other users.
Based on the seeds of discussion sown during the EGEE07 Conference, the PPS was deeply re-organised in order to make it more user-friendly, cost-effective, and to address the idiosyncrasies of the previous implementation.
A clear functional distinction was made between the set services addressed to end users (Middleware Preview Services) and those in support of the middleware certification (Middleware Quality Services).
In addition to that the software distribution mechanism was dramatically improved by enabling a centrally managed distribution system for client tools.
This work describes the PPS service in the third phase of the EGEE project and the major differences with the previous implementation
Describe the activity, tool or service using or enhancing the EGEE infrastructure or results. A high-level description is needed here (Neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references is required).
The EGEE Pre-Production Service (PPS), since the early phases of the EGEE project, is offering early access to grid services in preview to users both from the EGEE and WLCG communities.
PPS users are put in the condition to test their applications against the latest versions of the middleware in order to evaluate functional changes and new features.
The pre-production grid also extends the scope of the middleware certification, helping into evaluating operability and functionality.
