I had a chat to one of our MICE PhD students a couple of weeks ago and I was explaining how to use EGEE data management (SRMs, LFCs, FTS, lcg utils, etc.). His comment afterwards was "I didn't know I was going to do a PhD in data management...".
The problem is that all these tools are very low level, so any user community has to build a higher level infrastructure on top of this. Obviously the LHC experiments have done this extensively, but it is frustrating that there is no simple generic data management service for smaller VOs who lack the resources of the larger VOs.
I wonder if this accounts for the popularity of SRB in other communities? It may have some limitations, but it clearly offers a higher level data storage, cataloging and metadata service which must be attractive for smaller user communities. Surely there is a potential project to try and tie all of the EGEE components into a sensible data management system?
2 comments:
I agree, but of course all the financial cuts to GridPP have precluded any meaningful work in this sort of area. Would it be less effort for us to try and support SRB in parallel? Or to accelerate links with NGS sites where SRB is supported?
Dave.
Hi Dave
In the GridPP context I don't see how we could support SRB - we have a hard enough time just doing the SRMs.
However, it might be useful to speak to Jens (who at least knows more about SRB) and get some idea of what the NGS SRB infrastructure offers. Having our smaller VOs in some way straddle services offered between GridPP and NGS is probably useful looking to a future NGI.
Graeme
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