WLCG Workshop

There's a lot on the agenda page, and Jamie's CHEP summary talk is a useful round up, but here are my highlights:

• GDB consider services necessary for WLCG operations to basically have been delivered, but not fully deployed (far less extensively tested and battle hardened). My own feeling is that in the integration and mutual interaction (e.g., VOMS and SRM v2.2) of all these services with WLCG production we've still a long way to go.
• In their pre-acceptance tests, the gLite-CE and the CREAM CE did about as well as one another. Given that CREAM has a simpler internal architecture and is more standards compliant it has been chosen over the gLite-CE (which is "no longer being developed"). It's anticipated that CREAM will be first delivered to production in the New Year, but that in total it's anticipated to take about a year from now before it's fully hardened, sites have experience in running it and the YAIM configuration is fully working - oh! just around data taking time ;-) However... this seems rather sensible to me to have settled on the one CE, rather than the unsatisfactory situation of having 2 on the go. Pity the poor folk who put effort into actually running gLite CE as a service!
• Operations: We still have trouble sharing knowledge. 2007 was the year of the grid blog, but only a fool would pretend that will solve all our problems. I proposed a wiki plugin, where articles less than a month old would be black on white, with the text gradually fading to paler shades of grey the longer the article was unrevised. When it reaches white the article is expired!
• SAM is the test framework for everyone. Experiments should publish their tests into SAM so that it's a one-stop-shop for sites' status.
  
• Monitoring: We look forward to a proper demo of the SAM/nagios framework at EGEE.
• SRM v2.2: Confusion still abounds. What spaces to ATLAS want at T2s? Not even they know yet...
• Dress Rehersals: Lots going on for every experiment. See their presentations for more details.
• Common Computing Readiness Challenge (CCRC): There's an urgent need to tests the whole of the Accelerator->T0->T1->T2 chain for all experiments before real data flows. This will probably happen in February (limited, because not everything will be ready) and in May (really, has to work!). I expect this to be quite a big deal for everyone, especially the May round.
  
• ATLAS Session: Good information on Production Dashboard, DDM dashboard and operations (with cool http queries).