Description
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure links about 200 participating computing centers affiliated with several partner projects. It is built by integrating heterogeneous computer and storage resources in diverse data centers all over the world and provides CPU and storage capacity to the LHC experiments to perform data processing and physics analysis. In order to be used by the experiments, these distributed resources should be well described, which implies easy service discovery and detailed description of service configuration. Currently this information is scattered over multiple generic information sources like GOCDB, OIM, BDII and experiment-specific information systems. Such a model does not allow to validate topology and configuration information easily. Moreover, information in various sources is not always consistent. Finally, the evolution of computing technologies introduces new challenges. Experiments are more and more relying on opportunistic resources, which by their nature are more dynamic and should also be well described in the WLCG information system.
This contribution describes the new WLCG configuration service CRIC (Computing Resource Information Catalog) which collects information from various information providers, performs validation and provides a consistent set of UIs and APIs to the LHC VOs for service discovery and usage configuration. The main requirements for CRIC are simplicity, agility and robustness. CRIC should be able to be quickly adapted to new types of computing resources, new information sources, and allow for new data structures to be implemented easily following the evolution of the computing models and operations of the experiments.
The implementation of CRIC was inspired by the successful experience with the ATLAS Grid Information System (AGIS). The first prototype was put in place in a short time thanks to the fact that the substantial part of AGIS code was re-used though some re-factoring required in order to perform clean decoupling in two parts:
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A core which describes all physical endpoints and provides a single entry point for WLCG service discovery.
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Experiment-specific extensions (optional), implemented as plugins. They describe how the physical resources are used by the experiments and contain additional attributes and configuration which are required by the experiments for operations and organization of their data and work flows.
CRIC not only provides a current view of the WLCG infrastructure, but also keeps track of performed changes and audit information. Its administration interface allows authorized users to make changes. Authentication and authorization are subject to experiment policies in terms of data access and update privileges.
| Primary Keyword (Mandatory) | Computing middleware |
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| Secondary Keyword (Optional) | Accounting and information |
