Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/4/2002 Partner Logo The Testbed – A User View Stephen Burke, PPARC/RAL

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 u Virtual Organisations u User interface machine u Genius portal u What works u What doesn’t work u What users are doing u User support u Demo

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 Virtual Organisations u Each experiment constitutes one VO u Members are defined by a VO LDAP server at NIKHEF, entries are made by an administrator u Currently each person can only belong to one VO u Each VO has one Replica Catalogue, and an area on Storage Elements to store files u Eventually VOs will also have their own Resource Brokers and Information Indices

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 VOs (2) u Currently, we have VOs for the four LHC experiments, Earth Observation, Biomedical, and iteam/wp6 u Members of a VO are mapped to a VO-based Unix group at each site u Sites should be prepared to support any VO if requested u Currently not much support for per-VO quotas, will change in the future

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 User Interface u Users need a machine on which they have a standard login account u Can use gppui.gridpp.rl.ac.uk, better to have a local machine u May be able to install UI software on a standard machine, but not yet well-tested

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 Genius Portal u Web portal developed by INFN (not an official DataGrid product) u Runs on a UI machine, gives access from anywhere with a web browser u So far only installed on a UI at Catania (needs a local login account) u Convenient for some things, but still under development u See demo later

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 What Works Now u Authorisation (getting a certificate, joining a VO, signing the usage policy) is working fairly well u Job submission is OK, although the broker is rather unstable at the moment u Jobs can be steered to find input files or other resources

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 Current Problems u Using GDMP to register files in a Replica Catalogue is quite hard at the moment (see -edg-testbed.pdf). It should be easier with GDMP v3 in Testbed edg-testbed.pdf u It isn’t yet fully defined how to set up an application environment (where to find compilers, experiment software etc) at each site, but this is improving u There is no real scheme to manage disk space on Worker Nodes, users will probably assume they can write large files into the working directory

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 Current Problems (2) u There is no Replica Manager yet, files must be replicated by hand using GDMP or globus-url-copy u The testbed only includes a few sites so far, so there is no experience with a large system

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 What Are Users Doing? u So far just fairly simple tests u Experiments are planning to use the Testbed for MC challenges this year u If we get something like a stable, “production” testbed users will probably use it – build it and they will come! u Experiments have each defined a list of sites they would most like to see in the testbed - UK sites are Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lancaster, Liverpool, Oxford, RAL

Stephen Burke – Sysman meeting - 22/04/ /11 User Support u There is a user guide on the WP6 web page ( Users-Guide.html) but it isn’t all that completehttp://marianne.in2p3.fr/datagrid/documentation/EDG- Users-Guide.html u There is lots of documentation, but you need to be an expert already to find what you want! u Users currently ask questions on the integration team mailing list, but this is not scalable u Local system managers need to know enough to field basic user questions u We should think about a better support structure