GridPP Technical Meeting

Europe/London
Virtual Only

Virtual Only

Andrew McNab (University of Manchester), David Colling (Imperial College Sci., Tech. & Med. (GB))
Description

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

There are minutes attached to this event. Show them.
    • 1
      Tier-2 Evolution: Jobs in VMs
      • a) Vac, Vac-in-a-Box, Vcycle
        Speaker: Andrew McNab (University of Manchester)
      • b) ATLAS VMs & news
        Speaker: Peter Love (Lancaster University (GB))
      • c) CMS VMs & news
        Speaker: Andrew David Lahiff (STFC - Rutherford Appleton Lab. (GB))
      • d) LHCb VMs & news
        Speaker: Andrew McNab (University of Manchester (GB))
      • e) GridPP DIRAC VMs and other experiments
      • f) Site updates relating to Vac, Cloud, and VMs

        Anything sites want to report this week

    • 2
      Tier-2 Evolution: Storage
      Speaker: Samuel Cadellin Skipsey
    • 3
      Development of GridPP services

      e.g. the GridPP DIRAC service

    • 4
      Other updates from the Storage Group
    • 5
      Networking including IPv6
    • 6
      Security
      Speaker: Ian Neilson (STFC RAL (GB))
    • 7
      AoB
    • 8
      Centos 7