Speaker
Impact
The work has shown several areas where weaknesses in the gLite grid middleware and site configuration of that middleware can cause problems
for smaller VOs. Through the support given an increasing amount of processing is being done on the grid. The lessons learned and workarounds
employed are useful to the communities who then benefit directly and to the developers and operations staff who work to improve the stability
and ease of use of the infrastructure.
Description of the Work
GridPP is the UK Particle Physics grid resource and infrastructure provider and a member of the Worldwide LHC Grid project and as such
provides substantial resources. While not specifically funded to help other communities access the grid resources, GridPP has encouraged
non-LHC groups to port their computing operations to the grid and has provided whatever support it can to those efforts for collaborations
such as: T2K; snoplus; fusion; cernatschool; na62; camont; neiss. The work includes helping to make
use of submission frameworks like Ganga, adopting better data management practices and debugging issues with jobs that fail.
Conclusions
The work is leading to conclusions (and ongoing work) such as:
- that smaller VOs need a well defined data management approach before users submit potentially harmful job requests (for example pulling data off remote SEs to WNs)
- that site configuration for VOs evolve and this needs to be regularly tested (VOMS changes, middleware path changes etc.) as even small periods of inactivity can lead to decaying resources accessible
- the infrastructure provider needs easy access to results of jobs submitted under VO proxies
- user documentation often misses critical explanations - such as what is a spacetoken
It is also highlighting that there remains a barrier to entry and use that needs to be further reduced in order to encourage wider adoption.
Overview (For the conference guide)
GridPP provides grid accessible resources across 19 institutes. While the primary task of GridPP is to
support the Large Hadron Collider experiment Virtual Organisations (VOs), it allows much wider access with dedicated fairshares of 1% to non-LHC VOs. In this paper we present an overview of the non-LHC VOs using GridPP resources and highlight the work done, by GridPP and the VOs, to improve their use of the infrastructure. The paper explores common issues encountered by these communities and describes what they have done, and are currently doing, to overcome challenges faced.
