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Venue

This meeting will be held via Access Grid from 9:30 to 13:30. Please contact David Wallom (david.wallom AT oerc.ox.ac.uk) for details of how to join this meeting.

Instructions for Participation

Session Title: Campus Grids SIG Set up Time: 09:15 - 09:30, 28 Jun 2007 BST Meeting Time: 09:30 - 13:30, 28 Jun 2007 BST Conference Contact: David Wallom, david.wallom at oerc.ox.ac.uk

Encryption key: NOT ENCRYPTED

Virtual Venue: -- Red Barn: red-barn(sam.ag.manchester.ac.uk)@conference.mcs.anl.gov

Agenda

• Rollcall
• Report of previous meeting
• OMII-UK, Tim Parkinson
• A Campus Grid-SIG requirements document for OMII-UK
• A repository for tools developed within the community that should be shared.
• Description of the next meeting

Report

Roll call

Present

• Cardiff: James Osborne, Apologies from Hugh Beedie
• Reading: Jon Blower, Steve Gough, Ian Bland
• Cambridge: Mark Calleja, Maybe Bruce Beckles later
• Edinburgh: Mike Baker, Sam Skipsey
• Newcastle: Mark Hewitt
• Oxford: David Wallom, Steven Young
• Southampton: Tim Parkinson

Apologies

UCL: Clare Gryce

Previous Meeting

The report of the first meeting is available on the Campus Grids, Meetings, Oxford Meeting page of the e-SciNet wiki. Access to this is through an initial username and password. Which will be sent out post meeting.

OMII-UK

The presentation given by Tim Parkinson: http://wikis.nesc.ac.uk/_escinet/files/7/7f/OMII-UK-CAMPUSGRIDS-20070628.ppt

Discussion

A place will be made in the OMII catalogue for Campus Grid related components that can be submitted by the community.

OMII are funding a new wrapper for the underling tools of the Access Grid. Its compatibility with InSORS (which a lot of institutions installed) was raised as a concern. The OMII commented that as the staff funded are physically located in the Access Grid Support centre they should be aware of issues.

It was raised again as a compatibility issue that the OMII-OGM (Open Grid Manager) should have interfaces to other systems management tools like Ganglia, Big Brother etc. that many sites already widely use. This was taken as the first concrete piece of requirements that we were giving to OMII.

Within the accounting work that OMII are funding the question was asked whether the accounting components will provide accounting on more than just computing but data and services as well? It was considered that with the contribution to the OGF Usage Record Standard V2 that there would be facilities of this sort available.

As many within the SIG are using Condor pools it is urgently needed to get the capability to easily use parameter sweep jobs into the JSDL specification.

As Matlab is used by many users and in particular in the future the Distributed Computing Engine there is need to integrate this better into the OMII stack. Tim referred to the SAGA implementations and more specifically the Java SAGA binding into Matlab. ACTION: A survey of users to find out Matlab requirements, as part of the ‘Users, Computing’ requirements document work.

One issue raised is that of accessing on-campus and off-campus resources. Is there a distinction between these resources in OMII software? Currently OMII view these as the same with the access methods they have such as GridSAM etc. There might be authorisation differences though of course. What stage were the portal/portlet projects? As OMII have only just commissioned them they expecting the first releases by expected by end of the year.

As the AHE is becoming more popular with users there was a question about Resource Brokering in AHE? Answer: Currently OMII don’t have that though in general OMII will have a resource brokering product (from work by Bath and Cardiff), knoogle.

Q: Of all the people present which institutions are planning to use Shibboleth? A: Majority indicated yes.

Q: Is everyone waiting for Shibboleth 2 which has command line tools? A: No, many institutions have already started setting up a Shibboleth IdP, for example Edinburgh has set up Shibboleth infrastructure.

In the security work that OMII have ongoing it was questioned whether there are plans for Hardware Trusted Platform Module integration with authentication framework? As Laptops are now coming with TPM e.g. Oxford will be integrating this into Condor. OMII responded that currently they didn’t but would observe what other people were going to do.

With the wide range of products available from OMII there was an explicit question about whether OMII offers training? Participants from Edinburgh will find out about training for OMII. It was pointed out that the Grid Summer School will have material about OMII components though this is now full.

Requirements Document

TP: commented that he hadn't heard much about data. DW: There is an ongoing ETF AFS evaluation looking at Globus AFS evaluation. JB: Reading are looking at SRB. GridSAM doesn't have an SRB binding. There are webDAV solutions. No one seems to be using rsync for synchronisation of large data sets. DW asked whether sites are running on shared filesystems. Mainly no responses.

DW suggested that it would be good for OMII to engage more with Condor developers.

MC asked about monitoring of jobs. Users can't see their jobs running. It was commented that a global file system would help with watching job output. MC mentioned the use of Parrot at Cambridge. Parrot supports a load of authentication schemes. Works in user space. There is currently no Windows support but the developers are seeking funding. Edinburgh are in early stages of better integrating condor pools across campus. They would welcome recommendations about global file systems. Cambridge e-Science web site has tutorials on usage of Parrot.

Requirements Report The report will be split up into different areas, each of which will be written by a different author. They are User Perspectives(Computing and Data), Services Security, Accounting, Monitoring

Users: Computing: James Osborne: Matlab, BLAST

Users: Tools, Data: Jon Blower: Data perspective and Shared Filesystems

Security: Ian Bland

Accounting: David Wallom

Monitoring: Mark Calleja: Job monitoring for users and Monitoring for systems/grid.

Those people within the SIG community not mentioned are to liaise with people leading sections. There is a deadline 3 weeks (19 July) for the first draft of each section to be written.

Questions

How many centers are currently participating? There were 18 different Universities that responded to original call for the SIG.

Tools repository Use the OMII Catalogue

AOB

1) Next meeting is collocated with AHM. No need to register for AHM.

2) Is the meeting format working? Question about audio quality.