Baseline Services Working Group

Date 04 03 2005

Present at CERN:

Markus Schulz (secretary)
Nicholas.Thackray ( minutes)
Dirk Düllmann
Julia Andreeva
Miguel Branco
Alessandro de Salvo
Latchezar Betev
Erwin Laure

Remote Participants:

Peter Elmer
Anders Waananen
Flavia Donno
Peter Elmer, Stefano Lacaprara
Andrei Tsaragorodtsev
Steve Traylen
Razvan Popescu

Agenda page: http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a051355

The minutes will not contain a detailed description of the slides, but outline the
discussions triggered by the slides.

Alice (Latchezar Betev)  started the series of presentations.

Comments on the slides: 

Page 2 – 
Page 3 – Flavia: is version 1 or 2 of SRM is being mentioned in last sub point of  1)
	Speaker: said that wasn’t sure but was the functionality in Jean-P’s talk (also                   mentioned on slide).
Erwin: SRM interface for xrootd?  Answer: Not in current implementation.  But this functionality will be available in the next few months

Page 4 – 
Page 5 – Erwin: Clarificaiton to the slide - gLite FPS does not include algorithms for choosing best sites as such.
Page 6 – decision at the last meeting was to discuss CE seperately to the WMS.
	Proposal is that the WMS is not a baseline service (this is to be discussed in a future meeting).
	Markus: What does “VO management” mean in the end of this slide?
Speaker: How are VO roles and groups (as defined by VOs) supported by the  underlying middleware?
Markus: Not much can be done with CE.  Needs to be implemented at a higher level.  
Erwin: In his opinion we are not near to this.
Markus: Everything mapped to a unix user has to be limited.
Speaker: Do we have to define a basic set of roles?
All: yes
Markus: What needs to be supplied by the middleware to maintain the VOs?
Atlas rep: VOMS should be sufficient.

ATLAS (Miguel Branco)

Page 1 – 
Page 2 – 
Page 3 – Markus: everything can be expressed as a list of files?  Speaker: yes
Page 4 – Speaker: local file catalog has view of the site (not the whole grid).  This has been done due to the difficulties of having one catalog per grid (LCG, nordugrid and ??)
Question: how do you make the file name unique if a catalog is for a site only.
Answer: site name plus LFN can make file name unique.
Markus: Assumes that the sites run the service (file catalog)?
Speaker: yes.
Page 9 – Markus: will the lifetime management be assumed to be part of the  DPM?
            Speaker: to be decided
	Markus: when would this be required?  Is this a minimum requirements?
	Speaker then said : lifetime management will be in application space 
              Explicity: do not expect the middleware to do this.

LHCb (A.Tsaregorodtsev)
Page 1 – 
Page 2 - 6: overview
Page 5 – want to be able to use resources outside of LCG 
Page 7 – Services managed by agents.
Page 8 – 
Page 9 – 
Page 10 – originally used bookkeeping database as file catalog but this was not the proper use for the database so looked for alternative – Alien file catalog
Page 11 – Markus: bulk transfers ??
Speaker: this transfer agent is to return the files at the end of the job.
Page 12 – 
Page 13 – 
Page 14 – 
Page 15 – 
Page 16 – 
Page 17 – 
Apge 18 – In this model the VOs look after all services
Page 19 – Markus: this will not be accepted by the sites (installation of services).
Speaker : but this is in user space.
Markus: problem is with inbound connectivity.  Also sites will be reluctant to give access to high speed networks outside the firewalls. Problem is that site is responsible for the resources, but the users will have control over the resources.
Speaker : want to discuss deployment paradigm rather than operations paradigm.  This deployment method might in principle be useful.  Also CEs will be specially configured to limit power of the agents.
Page 20 – 
Page 21 – central catalog
Markus: what is the “high rate of queries” for the central catalog?
speaker: not known.
Markus: number is needed for design and selecting appropriate catalogues
What about availability of  catalog? Particularly network?  
Speaker: central catalog is not set in stone
Markus: requirements clarification: could live with subset  of srm functionality and slightly extended CE plus SE?
Speaker: yes, this is a minimum.
Speaker: we have had a lot of problems with SRM
Markus: what is your minimum functionality for SRM?
Speaker: SRM needs to tell which protocols are available (rootd, gridftp, rfio, etc.) we can't rely for this on the information system

CMS (Peter Elmer)
Page 2 – 
Page 3 – 
Page 4 – 
Apge 5 – 
Page 6 – 
Page 7 – waht did you mean by technology looking for use cases?
	Speaker: Talking about distribution. There are several ideas but this needs to be defined.
Page 8 – 
Page 9 – 

Markus: what is asked from the baselien services?  Not clear from the presentations.
              Some have stated this explicitly, some more in an implicit way. We need to define better where 
              the baseline services start and where the application level components take over.

It was agreed that this can be done by comments send to the minutes.

The next meeting will take place next Friday and CERN will try to get VRVS working for the meeting.
The focus for the next meeting will be on the minimal requirements for 
SRM
reliable file transfer service 
catalogues