LHC Computing Grid Project

Project Execution Board

Notes of the meeting of Tuesday November 4, 2003 - Draft

 

Present:

Ian Bird, Marco Cattaneo, Tony Doyle (phone), Chris Eck, Francois Etienne, David Foster, Fabrizio Gagliardi, Matthias Kasemann (phone), Jürgen Knobloch, Miron Livny, Alberto Masoni, Mirco Mazzucato, Bernd Panzer, Ruth Pordes (phone), Gilbert Poulard, Les Robertson

Minutes of previous meeting(s) (October 14) and matters arising

The minutes of the last meeting incorporating a change proposed by Ruth were approved. The new version is available here.

 

Status and Update on High Energy Physics Joint Technical Board and Grid 2003 (Ruth Pordes) (  transparencies )

 

The Intergrid Joint Technical Board (JTB) was established 2 years ago. The first year goals were defined by “Glue” and aimed at enabling interoperability between the EU and US physics grid projects. A number of tasks were accomplished such as: Interoperability of authenticating certificates, the use of a first common schema, running of jobs across EU and US grids. On the other hand there are things that could not yet be achieved such as a single version of RLS.

As next steps, the membership of the JTB will be extended, the work on items from Glue Phase II which has started will be continued, and a workshop will be held in March 2004 in Frankfurt to survey and present the HEP requirements and experiences as well as progress on standards.

Grid2003 (Grid3) is a coordinated project between iVDGL, GriPhyN, PPDG, and the physics experiments, principally being led by USCMS and USATLAS.  The Grid3 environment is now deployed on 25 sites with about 1500 processors. Targeted tests with LCG for ATLAS and CMS are starting. At Fermilab, local discussions address the question of common grid interfaces across groups such as Run II using SAM and CMS using VDT.

 

In the discussion, the question of “namespaces” (experiment-wide vs subgroups) was raised. The JTB is considered a good place to discuss technical matters and propose solutions which should then be forwarded to the respective communities. It is recognized that there are two strong communities – OSG and EGEE. A way on how to pull together SAM and RLS is not obvious.

 

Proposed reorganisation of PEB and SC2  (  document )

Les presented a proposal to re-organize the PEB and the SC2. The proposal comes in two flavors depending on whether SC2 continues to organize reviews or the review process is taken over by the LHCC. The problem with the current PEB is that the coordinators are not present and therefore decisions on certain things cannot be taken at the meeting. In the PEB - renamed Project Management Board (PMB) - the computing coordinators and the area managers would be present.

The general feeling was that it is a good thing to improve the decision-making process by including the coordinators.

The discussion circled around the question of representation of regional centres. It was agreed that having all regional centres represented individually would make the meeting too big and that a “smallish” number of people was ok. The proposal of having two or three people representing the regional centres was felt appropriate though identifying the right people will be difficult. One possibility would also be that just the GDB chairperson would represent the centres and regions and act as the link between the PMB and GDB.

The discussion will continue in the SC2 and a decision will be taken at the next POB.

 

AOB

Actions from Computing RRB

Chris reported that a task force to create a draft of the computing MoU for LCG will start now. Initially, until end 2003, the task force will be led by Hans Hoffmann. The LCG MoU will be one of five – the others covering each of the experiments. It will be important to watch that the LCG MoU is compatible with experiments MoUs. As next step Hans Hoffmann will send the mandate to CRRB and ask for nomination of members of the task force. He will then select the membership for final agreement.

It is expected that the task force will produce a preliminary text by the time of the CRRB on 27 April 2004 – leading to a draft MoU for October 2004. The aggressive timescale is important because experience has shown that it takes a long time to obtain all the signatures.

In the RRB there is increasing pressure to replace the CERN-centric presentation by presentations from the other centres.

The question was raised whether the manpower report should be limited to CERN or whether the outside situation should be also reported.

 

Internal project review

The LCG internal review for Grid and Fabric is now organized for October 17-19 and the session outline is available from the PEB agenda pages. The experiments will be asked short presentations on how they plan to arrive at the computing models.

 

LHCC comprehensive review

The schedule is also available on the PEB agenda pages.

 


Jürgen Knobloch