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.

Notes from Technical meeting

GPUs

Prompted by GridPP session where all sorts of aspects tof GPU usage was discussed. Several VOs use these eg LHCb. GridPP management were encouraging and there maybe cash for GPUs. Within Dirac there is the capability to add tags. Currently tagged jobs go to queues with tags but so can other jobs. This will change in the next release of Dirac. There may be a delay before it becomes production but can be on the development/preproduction. It will be made clear that this is a preproduction service and may change.

Some discussion about how to identify the correct GPU set up. This is a can of worms!

Raul's Items

Globus toolkit is being deprecated - how will the parts that we need be supported in the future. David Crooks suggested that the place for this discussion was the Authorisation Working group - at least for part of it. The service side of things is less clear. Let's revisit at the next meeting.

Standing items

(there is a need to evolve these as things have moved on)

Tier 2 evolution 

VAC - container support being tried at Manchester.

Storage

There was a discussion in the storage meeting  about Atlas sites to try xrootd redirecting. CMS already use this in the UK and it works well.

Services

NA62 want to use all their resources including at CERN via Dirac  and so Laurence Field is working on the CERN while Daniela and co work at this end.

Security

(Update from David Crooks)

This is a busy time for working group meetings. There was a meeting of the authorisation working group yesterday which had a couple of interesting presentations. See https://indico.cern.ch/event/669715/ 

We are making a good contribution here and other security officers are encouraged to join.

The traceability working group are also meeting and the there is a new container working group. This all needs to be tracked.

Two other meetings:

- preGDB slot in Novemeber 

- SOC working group 11th and 12th December. 

https://indico.cern.ch/event/669715/

https://indico.cern.ch/event/667605/

https://indico.cern.ch/event/667685/

On a different note there is a new kernel to combat a vulnerability. 

Other items had no reports and there was no AoB

There are minutes attached to this event. Show them.
    • 11:00 11:20
      GPUs 20m

      GPUs their use and how to support them (e,g, in Dirac)

      Speaker: Andrew McNab (University of Manchester)
    • 11:20 11:40
      Raul's suggestions 20m
      • Atlas equivalent of the CMS Efficiency Task Force?
        . How is CPU efficiency evaluated in Atlas? LHCb?
        . How are job scheduling policies defined and evaluated in ATlas and LHCb?

      • Globus toolkit
        . being phased out
        https://indico.cern.ch/event/578990/contributions/2701558/attachments/1522525/2379199/globus_status.pdf
        . Are you (or anyone else) involved with its replacement or at least part of it?

      Speaker: Raul Cardoso Lopes (Brunel University (GB))
    • 11:20 11:25
      Tier-2 Evolution: Jobs in VMs 5m
      • Vac, Vac-in-a-Box, Vcycle 5m
        Speaker: Andrew McNab (University of Manchester)
      • ATLAS VMs & news 5m
        Speaker: Peter Love (Lancaster University (GB))
      • CMS VMs & news 5m
        Speaker: Andrew David Lahiff (STFC - Rutherford Appleton Lab. (GB))
      • LHCb VMs & news 5m
        Speaker: Andrew McNab (University of Manchester (GB))
      • GridPP DIRAC VMs and other experiments 5m
      • Site updates relating to Vac, Cloud, and VMs 5m

        Anything sites want to report this week

    • 11:30 11:35
      Tier-2 Evolution: Storage 5m
      Speaker: Samuel Cadellin Skipsey
    • 11:40 11:45
      Development of GridPP services 5m

      e.g. the GridPP DIRAC service

    • 11:50 11:55
      Other updates from the Storage Group 5m
    • 11:55 12:00
      Networking including IPv6 5m
    • 12:00 12:05
      Security 5m
      Speaker: Ian Neilson (STFC RAL (GB))
    • 12:15 12:20
      AoB 5m
    • 12:30 12:50
      Centos 7 20m