The User Forum in Uppsala continues with lots of interesting talks today. More user focussed today with sessions from Bioinformatics, Earth Science and Computational Chemistry. Again the buzz words of cloud, EC2, Eucalyptus and Open Nebula continue to mentioned during the Novel Technologies and Architectures sessions.


The cathedral in Uppsala.

Uppsala Begins

The last EGEE User Conference kicked off yesterday in Uppsala, Sweden. In fact this will be the last EGEE event ever as project finally shuts it doors at the end of the month. Even with this sad event looming everyone is in high spirits with the transition to EGI and the change that this will bring. Monday saw the conference begin with some interesting plenaries, including the history of Uppsala University. The 'old' building was the only building to be saved when the entire town burnt down. The 'new' building is actually constructed from the remnants of an old boat. Bought by the builder who was later made bankrupt by stumping up the cash in order to complete the building out of his own pocket. You could never tell that this incredibility ornate main auditorium has columns made of cast iron and an incredibility useful bullet proof ceiling of solid steel plates!

The rest of the day followed with sessions on security, user support, application porting and the 1st of two poster sessions. Tuesday will start with two technical plenaries and the first and last EGEE photo call.

Data Management and MICE

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?

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.

My fourth talk in Australia was the School of Physics Colloquium. Here was a chance to move away from the storage and data management focus, and deliver a much more general EGEE/LHC talk, which I entitled "Enabling Grids for eScience: How to build a working grid".

As ever, the RTM is a great start - it's such an attractive visualisation of the grid. This time I had no trouble getting it to work on my mac, although it only ever uses the primary display, so I had to put my laptop into mirror display mode, then flip back to two screens for the talk - a minor niggle.

I tried to speak about EGEE in a general way, introducing the project, the services delivered - even a slide on the "Life of a Job", problems commonly seen and operational aspects. The idea was to introduce the grid to potential users, rather than site admins or service providers. This seemed to go pretty well - no one obviously fell asleep (!) and there were a number of questions about EGEE and other grids, job efficiencies and data volumes. Later some of the graduate students complimented me on a good talk, so it must have been pitched at the right level.

I had intended to mention Byzantine Generals, but it slipped my mind. Single points of failure, eh...