J. Knobloch,
12/13 June 2003,
Present:
Tobias Haas
(Chair), Rosette Vandenbroucke (Belgium), Jürgen
Knobloch (CERN and secretary), Milos Lokajicek (Czech republic), Bjorn Nilsson (Denmark), Rainer
Mankel (Germany), Francesco Forti
(Italy,) Els de Wolf (Netherlands), Nicanor Colino (Spain), Dave
Bailey (UK),
By videoconference: Christophorus
Grab (
Tobias introduced
new committee members (Els de Wolf and Dave Bailey)
and thanked the outgoing member Alan Flavell for his
long participation (starting with HTASC meeting #1 in November 1995) and for
his most valuable contributions in HTASC.
The minutes were approved without changes.
Tobias gave a summary of the HEPCCC meeting of April 2003.
The meeting had a rather long agenda:
The HTASC report on the traveling physicist discussion was
well received. The HEPCCC requested a set of recommendations for sending to the
institutes. Tobias has delivered this document in the meantime.
The minutes of HEPCCC are available as (html) or (pdf).
The
CNAF will be a multi-experiment TIER-1 centre for ATLAS, BaBar, CMS, LHCb, ALICE, VIRGO
and later CDF serving also as testbed for DataGrid and DataTAG. During
phase 1, INFN-TIER1 is only considered as a prototype. The operational phase is
foreseen from end 2003 onwards. They have developed a farm monitoring
specifically for CNAF.
There is a fixed allocation of machines to experiments. With
the help of LCFG (http://www.lcfg.org/) it is considered
easy to re-allocate machines if required.
LINUX
Farm Management – openMosix (Enrico
Mazzoni) ( transparencies )
Enrico explained
the origin and the principles of openMosix.
OpenMosix
is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering turning a
network of Linux PCs into a supercomputer. It is possible that it will become
part of a future Linux kernel. It provides a single system image like on an SMP
with linear scalability in addition. It takes care of dynamic load balancing on
a large cluster. Enrico showed a number of benchmarks
(comparing also to PVM) confirming the good scalability. OpenMosix
also includes a file system providing direct data access at each node.
VRVS
Status and plans (Phillipe Galvez)
( transparencies )
Philippe presented the
architecture and new features of VRVS 3.0 as well as usage statistics and
future developments. The major improvements are:
-
Quasi-unlimited number of virtual
rooms
-
Global scheduling system now
transparent to local time zones
-
User-oriented login
-
Solution for host behind firewall
and NAT as well as secure web admin interface
-
Support for Mac OS X
-
support for OpenMash
Mbone
World wide there are now 73
reflectors in operation. The registration for the new system started on
February 20th. By June 12th there were 3981 users from 81
countries registered. The number of sessions per month is steadily growing and
has exceeded now 600.
Future developments include the
adaptation of IPv6, integration of new hardware/software for high-end
interactivity and improved security and monitoring.
Videoconferencing
within RedIRIS in
Nicanor
presented on behalf of Jose María Fontanillo
Muñiz. RedIRIS, the Spanish
national research & education network provides the necessary infrastructure
for multimedia services. The upgrade to RedIRIS2 is essential for high quality
videoconferencing over IP.
Videoconferencing
within JANET in the
The
Videoconferencing in
France (Christian Helft) ( transparencies )
The situation in
Summary
and Further Steps (Tobias Haas)
Tobias proposed to set up a Videoconferencing
Subgroup to advise HTASC and HEPCCC on the HEP needs for videoconferencing ( transparencies ). His proposal met general approval; it was,
however, felt that an extension of the mandate to computer supported
collaborative work in general would be useful. The initial focus should in any
case remain on videoconferencing. After a follow-up discussion on the second
day, it was concluded that Tobias Haas and Christian Helft
would work out a new draft mandate and distribute it by email to HTASC for
discussion and approval.
(email from C. Helft: more
information, revised proposal by T. Haas: document )
Virgo Data Analysis (Andrea Viceré) ( transparencies )
Andrea explained the
principles of the gravitational wave experiment Virgo. The basic principle is
that of a large Michelson Interferometer with two perpendicular arms of 3 km
each, multiple reflections extend the effective optical length of each arm to
150 km. The experiment is located at Cascina near
DESY has
now a commercial lab-wide spam filter in operation for the Windows and UNIX
mail servers. Spam and email-viruses are a general concern and one may look
into corporate signatures for HEP institutes.
GridKA in
The INFN
HEP computing held their annual workshop at
-
Mobility
(VPN, Wireless)
-
Services
to local users (Terminal server, trouble tickets, mailing and spam, instant
messaging)
-
Networking
-
Workstation
management (unattended installation for Windows, packaging tool for RPM)
-
Farms
(management, tiers, Condor)
-
GRID
-
LHC
computing models
France (Denis Linglin)
( transparencies )
The IN2P3
computing center in
-
Data
base support (Objectivity, Oracle, xSQL)
-
Purchase
and support of operating systems and other software
-
Customized
services
-
Test
and development of (Grid-) software
-
Videoconferencing-
MCU
-
Home
directories, CAD,
-
A
single system for hot-line and user support
-
Etc.
In
There is a
successful direct Swiss contribution to LCG via two people working at CERN in
the applications area.
In the
discussion, Chris emphasized the importance of coordination between the Tier-2 centres.
CERN (Jürgen Knobloch) ( transparencies )
Jürgen
reused a subset of transparencies presented the week before at the Focus
meeting at CERN by
For the CERN-IT
part, the following developments were covered:
-
Internet
services and desktops: 50% of the users have migrated to the new (MS-Exchange
based) infrastructure; the Spam-fight has been improved, new services such as
calendar, webmail and encrypted sessions are offered.
-
Databases:
POOL 1.1 has been released; an Oracle service for physics is available;
Objectivity has reached end of service at CERN
-
Data
challenges: the 1 GByte/s- to-tape data challenge has
achieved its goal with 920 MB/s sustained over a period of three days and 1.1
GB/s over 8 hours.
-
Security:
AFS password expiry is now enforced; hardware address registration is now
required for portables; visitors will have to request temporary access via a
web form.
-
External
networking: a record for Internet2 data transfer of 2.34 Gbit/s
between CERN and
-
Fabrics:
public RedHat 6 services have been terminated end
May.
The LCG developments covered were:
-
Five
projects are active in the application area; a new project on distributed
analysis is being started.
-
The
LCG-1 service will be based on software from the Globus
and Condor projects, packaged and delivered by the
-
A
new project, EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science and industry in
-
The
main priority for 2003 is to establish the LHC Grid as an operational service.
This requires that the CERN fabric (LXBATCH) be integrated and that the initial
object persistency POOL be release mid-year. For the distributed production
environment, the experiment-specific code needs to be integrated with the
common application services.
-
Nicanor
showed network diagrams demonstrating the good progress of the Rediris2 network
connecting the Spanish sites.
At the end
of the meeting, Tobias thanked Francesco for hosting the HTASC meeting in
With the successful use of
the CERN Agenda Maker, the HTASC Web site can be used just as entry point for
HTASC information and meeting-related documents can be stored in Agenda Maker.
The minutes of HTASC meetings will also be stored there – password protected
for a two-week period of approval by the committee members. The password is the
same as the one for downloading documents to the agenda.
The HTASC mailing list will
be limited to postings by HTASC members in order to prevent spam. Francesco
will implement this.