Speaker
Dr
Josva Kleist
(Nordic Data Grid Facility)
Description
AliEn or Alice Environment is the Gridware developed and used within the ALICE
collaboration for storing and processing data in a distributed manner. ARC (Advanced
Resource Connector) is the Grid middleware deployed across the Nordic countries and
gluing together the resources within the Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF). In this
paper we will present our approach to integrate AliEn and ARC, in the sense that
ALICE data management and job processing can be carried out on the NDGF
infrastructure, using the client tools available in AliEn. The interoperation has two
aspects, one is the data management part and the second the job management aspect.
The first aspect was solved by using dCache across NDGF to handle data. dCache
provides support for several data management tools (among them for xrootd the tools
used by AliEn) using the so called "doors". Therefore, we will concentrate on the
second part. Solving it, was somewhat cumbersome, mainly due to the different
computing models employed by AliEn and ARC. AliEN uses an Agent based pull model
while ARC handles jobs through the more "traditional" push model. The solution comes
as a module implementing the functionalities necessary to achieve AliEn job
submission and management to ARC enabled sites.
Authors
Dr
Csaba Anderlik
(Nordic Data Grid Facility)
Dr
Josva Kleist
(Nordic Data Grid Facility)
Co-authors
Andreas Peters
(CERN)
Pablo Siaz
(CERN)
