LHC Computing Grid Project

Project Execution Board

Notes of the meeting of Tuesday February 24, 2004

DRAFT 4 02/MAR/2004

Present:

Dario Barberis, Philippe Charpentier, Frédéric Hemmer, Bob Jones, Jürgen Knobloch (secretary), Massimo Lamanna, Alberto Masoni, Bernd Panzer, Les Robertson (chair), Zdenek Sekera, David Stickland, Torre Wenaus

Phone: Mirco Mazzucato,

Actions: Actions are identified by bold blue italics.

Minutes of last meeting and matters arising

The minutes of the meeting of the 12^th February were accepted.

Bernd raised the question of priorities for the use of the available CPU resources at CERN. He presented the following order which was agreed at a PEB meeting about 2 years ago:

1. Physics Data Challenges for the LHC experiments and productions/CDR for non-LHC experiments

2. Base service for all experiments

3. Computing Data Challenges for the Fabric (Architecture Verification)

4. if any resources available : Online related tests

The PEB reconfirmed this order of priorities.

There is a shortage of CPU resources in March. The request for an ATLAS online test with 500 nodes cannot be satisfied. If at all it has to run with a significantly reduced number of nodes.

Level-1 milestones

The LHCC is expecting for the March 24-25 meeting a new set of Level-1 milestones for the LCG project. Les and Jürgen have drafted a first proposal which was discussed and led to a new draft which will be further discussed at next PEB meetings.

Major decisions from recent meetings – AF

Torre summarized the two last meetings of the architects forum (AF). The detailed minutes of the meetings are at:

http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/mgmt/af.html

From the meeting of January 29 he reported that the experiments have made substantial progress in optimizing their use of POOL concerning performance and file sizes. Reported problems with RLS and its interaction with POOL that impacted CMS to get production going with LCG-2 have in the meantime been solved.

On February 19 ATLAS reported the completion of the Geant4 validation with 500k events produced. The SEAL workplan was agreed. A technical plan for Mathlib is being developed in a forum including experts from all experiments.

Planning status of the EGEE middleware – Frédéric ( transparencies )

Frédéric started with the list of people and their roles. Recently, most people working on the EGEE project have been busy with EDG final review. A document for the service definition is in preparation and should be ready by the first week of March. A workshop to discuss the document is planned shortly afterwards. An initial prototype will be ready as early as end of April. The following steps will be discussed at a second workshop in May. All this will be announced to the community by end February.

The hiring for the EGEE project is proceeding well. The integration of people from other institutes will be addressed in the very near future. The project plans to use the standard SPI environment for software process support.

Request from ATLAS for MySQL support

The topic was postponed to a later meeting invite the experts.

A.o.b.

There was some discussion on where the 4 new people to work on Arda would be located. After the decision of the last PEB to have the Arda project not located in the application area, the management of the PH department decided that they would not be in PH/SFT. Les argued that physical proximity to the experiments and to the SFT group was more important than administrative assignment. The four experiments insist to have the four Arda people to be in PH/SFT. This position will be communicated to the CERN management. In the end, the way how they will be integrated in the experiments will come out of discussions of Massimo with the experiments.

Bob reported that the final EU Data Grid review went very well. The project officially ends end-March.

The open source license now approved – the next step is to see whether it is compatible with GPL.

Bob has provided a more detailed summary including links to more information at:

http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a04833&id=a04833s1t3/moreinfo

Markus reported on a request of Alice to move 23 TB of data within one month. Alice cannot yet use gridFTP and have to use their own data moving service. In the short-term three servers will be provided where Alice can run their own software. It is planned in the medium term that Alice would move to the supported IT service such that the access through the special servers can be closed.

Actions
#	Date opened	Description	Responsible	Date closed
1	16dec03	ALICE, CMS and LHCb to name someone responsible for coordinating deployment on LCG-2	Federico, David S., Philippe	Done
2	16dec03	Understand why the substantial resources in Liverpool are not available for LCG-2. 6jan04- visit to RAL organised for 24jan04	Les	Done
3	16dec03	Confirm that the absence of BNL in the LCG-2 deployment list is due to manpower shortage	Les	Done
4	16dec03	Experiments to request through their national contacts that their resources in the core LCG-2 centres are integrated in LCG-2	Federico, Dario, David S., Philippe	Done
5	16dec03	Regional centres to be asked to clarify their mass storage plans. Presented by RCs in GDB of 13jan04	Les	13jan04
6	12jan04	Revised proposed GAG mandate	Federico	27jan0
7	27jan04	Revised ARDA note	Les	12feb04
8	27jan04	Establish a weekly “Deployment Meeting”	Ian	2feb04
9	27jan04	Note on new project proposal from Trento	Federico
10	12feb04	Define new name for middleware	Bob
11	12feb04	Nominate Arda contact persons	Experiments
12	12feb04	Nominate people for Phase 2 requirements of the experiments	Experiments