EGEE 07 Round-up

Here's a round-up of notes and interesting bits

EGI (European Grid Infrastructure) was a big theme during the conference. This is expected to be the permanent grid infrastructure replacement which arrives after the end of EGEE III. There's lots to be worked out, not least of which is the need for a sustainable national grid infrastructure (NGI) in each country or region.

NA4

Workbench Overview: Taverna; Review; There will always be a zoo of workflow engines. Which one to choose? No answer yet! Information system - need to engage GLUE. Pushes pain from workflow people to middleware providers?

Lots of portals and workflows out there - Taverna, P-Grade, Ganga/Diane.

Unfortunately because of SA3 and SA1 sessions didn't get to see the demos.


SA3

gLite release process: should patches be bundled or not? can we divide
patches into the simple RPM updates and more complex changes requiring
reconfiguration.

YAIM 4 is coming. Proper component based YAIM - heirarchy of
configuration files (site general -> component specific). Should be
much better. Has _pre and _post function hooks - much more flexible to
override aspects of YAIM, but not lose core functionality.


SA1

Ian Bird: Good overview of operations. Big scale up next year with the LHC. Transition to EGI and RGIs will be a very big challenge.


JRA1

gLite Overview:

See Claudio's presentation. Note that for highest performance should
separate LB and WMS. Well, for an initial trial service this is
probably not needed (not supporting 12000 jobs a day!). Time scale for
porting components to SL4 i386 is now (roughly) known.

x86_64 expected to be complete next spring (but DPM/LFC already
there).


OMII Europe:

I sat in on this as it was a project I had heard a lot about, but didn't know what they did. They have partners in US and Asia and do this:

Adding BES support to CREAM. (Might _eventually_ lead to dropping native CREAM interface, but not soon - WMS uses this). BES is the proposed OGF standard for job submission.

Adding SAML support to VOMS. (Security Assertion Markup Language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAML).

Involved in Glue 2.0. Will help with schema production in XML and LDAP and assist standardisation efforts.