3rd Campus Grid SIG Meeting

1. 3rd Campus Grid SIG Meeting

2. Agenda • Welcome • OMII Requirements document • Grid Data Group • HTC Workshop • Research Computing SIG? • AOB • Next meeting (AG)

3. What is the SIG? • Group for the promotion of Campus Grid facilities throughout the UK academic community • Solidify best practice throughout the UK community • Groundwork for larger collaboration including regional grids

4. The story so far • 1st meeting in Oxford in April • Presentations from each campus grid represented • Discussion of top four issues facing campus grid providers • 2nd meeting over Access Grid • Presentation on the OMII roadmap

5. OMII Requirements Document • Give OMII a concrete list of developments needed by our community • Separated into five areas • Applications • Security • Accounting • Monitoring • Storage

6. Storage, Jon Blower • Support reading/writing from/to SRB systems as these appear to be fairly widely used • Some groups appear to be moving towards WebDAV-based systems so it is recommend that OMII consider supporting this. • SFTP/SCP is also commonly used - I think this might already be supported but if it isn't, this would be very useful. This will be available to lots of users on Campus (since they can access files on any server they can SSH to) so might be a good fallback even where other options are available. • Filesystem-based solutions (e.g. AFS, Parrot) are independent of middleware and so are probably not important for OMII.

7. Accounting, David Wallom • Driven by • fEC • Tracing of resources donated to show fare share usage, especially as we move towards inter-institutional sharing and regional grids • Important that this be auditable • Standards based • OMII should develop a lightweight RUS server and client set • Independent of platform and requires no external software e.g. Tomcat etc. • Includes more than just processing usage but storage and services

8. Security, Ian Bland • Users do not like using grid certificates, • prefer the same authentication method as they used for more traditional computing/IT system. • mainly SSO systems such as Kerberos but increasingly Shibboleth. • OMII should actively support the inclusion of Shibboleth support for middleware system. • Support for authentication via SSO systems needs to be matched with support for authorisation via directory services, notably LDAP. • Integrity issues for the users are that data sets are consistent and not corrupt and that code will execute in a precise manner the need for a trusted platform extends to one that is robust and cannot be compromised. This is something OMII should consider, possibly in the context of a trusted computing platform.

9. Monitoring, Mark Calleja • GridSAM to provide a means of monitoring running jobs through connectivity to the underlying scheduler/system • through providing a standard view of the contents of the scratch space on a remote resource • Through being able to pipe on request stdout/stderr

10. Applications

11. Grid Data Storage UK • Data-Grids@campus-grids.ppt

12. HTC Workshop • Last week in November • Including • Condor • United Devices • Datasynapse • Digipede • Attendance from users, vendors and IT managers • Practical demonstrations and exercises as well as talks on research that has been made possible using HTC

13. Group Collaboration • Campus Grid SIG and UK e-Science Engineering Task Force similar aims and objectives can we work more formally together? • Research Computing SIG • Many campus grid providers also run university HPC facilities, push for more synergies between them • Launchpad for regional grids? Build on the example of NWGrid

14. AOB • Visualization • Talk by RAVE team • Networks • Firewall settings • Network performance • Access Methods • Portals • NGS Application Repository • Application Hosting Environment • Standard command line applications • API

15. Next Meeting?