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GridPP Technical meeting 2013-12-06
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Present: Andy McNab, Chris Walker, Lukasz Kreczko, Peter Love, Dan
Traynor, Ewan MacMahon, Robert Frank, Alessandra Forti, David Colling,
Daniela Bauer, Simon Fayer, Adam Huffman, Andrew Lahiff


1. CMS
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- Andrew Lahiff:

  - Continued testing of ramp-up speeds on HLT cloud, checking
    configuration on glideinWMS side, to ensure things working as fast
    as possible

  - 28 minutes to startup 2600 jobs; should be faster on next attempt

  - Database cleaning made an improvement and David said that Tim/Jan
    from CERN-IT were interested in the results

  - Andy McNab: could there be a problem in providing enough jobs for
    this resource from CMS

    - Andrew Lahiff - Condor would be the limitation and we don't seem to
      be near that yet


2. ATLAS
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- Peter Love:

  - No longer have access to HLT until 2014

      - Other work running there

  - Problems with upgrade to Condor 8, so rolling back to 7

  - General lack of jobs in ATLAS at the moment




3. 'Stealth cloud' - Daniela
----------------------------

- see slides

- David: how does it handle credentials for data access?

  - Simon: job arrives with proxy, like any normal job

- Chris: 1 VM per job?

  - Simon: 2 concurrent jobs per VM, will run next job in the queue
    once initial ones have finished

    - Each image has 2 vCPUs, glexec deals with changing users

- Chris: overhead of starting a VM?

  - Only a couple of minutes

  - VMs hang around for 20 minutes

  - glexec used mainly to protect the pilot proxy used by the cloud

- David: could this be used for commercial clouds?

  - Simon: in principle, yes

    - Access to storage might be a problem (currently relies on
      Imperial proxy servers)

- Adam: Upgraded GridPP cloud to Havana

  - David: CERN will upgrade in March


4. LHCb - Andy McNab
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- Vac now working with CVMFS-based contextualization, so ready for
  those sites that want to test

  - Ewan interested but this will be delayed by next week's DPM workshop


5. AOB
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- Alessandra: 

  - WLCG Multicore taskforce approved

    - She would like to have different sites running with different batch
      systems to contribute to testing