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.
Notes from technical meeting
VAC/vcycle
Andrew is working on cntainer support, not yet for other people but in development. Other people provide patches even though Andrew is still the main/sole developer.
ATLAS
Andrew L. has had real variety of jobs running on Azure for the last week. Andrew has developed cost monitoring and found that £300/day egress charges,
CMS
Brij (TIFR) is going to write up his Azure experience. These should be useful and interesting to other sites.
LHCb
Switching over Yandex to OpenStack (at the level of 1000 cores). these are being run using Vcycle and will grow to the level of ~3000 cores.
GridPP Dirac
Simon has worked on accessing SL7 resources in Dirac and there is now a patch that enables users to choose SL7 sites. There is a little more work to do but things are getting there. Instructions will be sent out when things are ready.
Vac sites.
L'pool have a big air con upgrade so number of cores will be reduced for a number of weeks
Glasgow have 1796 core running VAC as a test. There is more testing to do to get the multicore VMs running and integration with the batch system. They see some very interesting possibilities.
T2 Storage evolution
Raul has sent an email to the tb-support list detailing his work. He is using a 10TB SSD as a cache. This work looks to be interesting and he is supporting non-GridPP communities.
GridPP services
There was discussion about using using LFC and DFC with Dirac. People should use the DFC by default because the LFCis going away. Sam will circulate documentation on how to transition. This is a particular interst for T2K.
T2K are still still using the WMS. Imperial can provide help/advice on how to transition.
The FTS SOAP API is also deprecated. There are alternative commands. MICE have made the transition but SNO+ and others are still using.
Updates from the storage group.
No meeting this week this week because of the pre-GDB
Networking
Nothing to report.
Security
Nothing to report.
AoB and containers.
There was talk of the different self help groups for containers. Alessandra will email the tb-support list with ATLAS instructions.