GridPP Technical Meeting
Virtual Only
Fortnightly meeting for technical topics looking further ahead than the weekly ops meetings on Tuesdays. There are also dedicated storage group meeting on Wednesdays. Each topic can go beyond the nominal 5 minute slot whenever necessary.
Technical Meeting Notes
CPU/ workload management evolution
ATLAS
ATLAS Software week - ATLAS is pushing for containers and have a preference for singularity but if sites already have docker then that is fine. ATLAS is keen so as to have a well defined worker node environment. Pilots will go to the worker nodes and the pilot will then start a container. CVMFS may also be needed on the native worker nodes. This separates local environment from that seen by the grid experiment jobs.
Alessandra will send links to presentations to the list. Security issues to be examined.
CMS
CMS does use containers (see https://indico.cern.ch/event/612601/contributions/2495602/attachments/1424434/2184476/Singularity-in-CMS-v2.pdf ) but is much less keen than ATLAS at the moment.
Xrootd federation spreading across the UK and enables non-CMS sites and this happened at Oxford, QMUL and Glasgow
Storage evolution
Sam (in an ATLAS context) is looking at a classic SE like mini xroot federation so that smaller sites effectively disappear as ATLAS would like. They are working through possible issues that this approach (for example interactions with RUCIO). CMS would be quite happy with this as well.
Security
Update on the security working group was presented at ASGC by David Crooks (see http://indico4.twgrid.org/indico/event/2/session/14/contribution/16/material/slides/0.pdf ). David gave an outline of the talk and referred us to the presentation for details. There is a significant amount of work going into this at a variety of GridPP sites (Brunel, Glasgow, Durham ...).
Centos 7
Steve J. has started a small centos 7 cluster testing