Conveners
CVMFS infrastructure for EGI VOs
- Catalin Condurache (STFC)
Description
In the last 3 years the CernVM Filesystem (CernVM-FS) has transformed the distribution of experiment software to WLCG grid sites. CernVM-FS removes the need for local installation jobs and performant network fileservers at sites; in addition it often improves performance at the same time. Furthermore the use of CernVM-FS standardizes the computing environment across the grid and removes the need for software tagging at sites. Now established and proven to work at scale, CernVM-FS is beginning to perform a similar role for non-LHC computing.
The webinar will try to explain how this technology addresses and solves the problem of application software installation at sites and what are the costs, in terms of required infrastructure needed to be deployed and additional services necessary to be operated by site admins. Advantages and possible disadvantages in using CernVM-FS are also presented, so the user communities, the NGIs and the site administrators could assess better all the consequences implied by the use of CernVM-FS.
This session is targeted at:
* experiment users, who will discover what are the minimal steps needed to move from maintaining multiple experiment software areas to keeping a single master copy within a CVMFS repository
* site administrators, who will learn what is required to support CVMFS on their batch farms.
* Also the NGIs representatives will find out what support they can give to consolidate and optimise the CVMFS service and infrastructure.
Catalin Condurache graduated from the Technical University of Iasi, Romania, specialisation Computer Science. Since 2005 he has been working at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory UK within the Tier-1 LHC group, being a key member of the Grid Services team.
RAL Tier-1 played a major role in consolidating the CVMFS service available to the LHC VOs and last year Catalin took over the task to create a similar infrastructure for VOs supported by the GridPP UK project. Following the recognised success, now he is assuming a larger responsibility and looks into coordinating the deployment of CVMFS technology across the EGI NGIs and their supported VOs.
