1. Southgrid Technical Meeting Pete Gronbech: 24 th October 2006 Cambridge

2. Present Pete Gronbech – Oxford Santanu Das - Cambridge Yves Coppens – Birmingham Winnie Lacesso - Bristol

3. Agenda Topics SC4 –Experiences from Yves and all. Discuss how FTS channels work. Cross site support –Discuss the issue of access from remote sites for emergency use only. Specific hosts and users only with ssh keys. sudo probably to allow intervention when site adminis unavailable. We already have access to Bristol for Yves and Pete, Yves has access to Oxford. Cambridge agrees in principle. Birmingham to be decided, and RAL to be consulted. Interactive Workshop –Including helping Frederic Brochu

4. SouthGrid Status Throughput tests failed at Oxford, poor performance for reading and non existent for writing. The network monitoring boxes have provided valuable evidence that throughput decreased by approx 50% on the day the new campus firewall was installed. This may not be the whole story and investigations continue both with iperf tests across SouthGrid and further attempts to complete the FTS tests. iperf tests have shown that bandwidth of approx 500Mbps can be achieved with large tcp windows sizes to Manchester. However another test from Oxford to Bristol showed that more than 3 streams causes iperf to fail to complete successfully. If the problem turns out to be external to Oxford ie Thames Valley Network, we need to establish the contacts, and methods for escalating the problem to the MAN.

5. Southgrid Status South Grid continues to maintain good momentum, all sites are running the latest release and have SRM enabled se’s. All sites have network monitoring boxes installed, and have taken part in the throughput tests. RALPPD installed large upgrade 200 Opteron 270 cpu cores plus 15TB of storage. Cambridge expecting upgrade in Autumn. The latest stable release of Condor is now being used 6.8.1 but still not happy with the support from LCG for this ‘supported’ batch system. Bristol will have a percentage of the new Campus cluster from early next year. Jon Wakelin is working 50% on GPFS and Storm. Birmingham will have a percentage of the new Campus Cluster next year. The PPS has been very active in testing new middleware. Oxford will be able to expand resources once the new computer room is built. Now looking at Begbroke Science Park for joint bid with the Oxford Super Computer.