The Testbed – A User View

1. The Testbed – A User View Stephen Burke, PPARC/RAL

2. Virtual Organisations • User interface machine • Genius portal • What works • What doesn’t work • What users are doing • User support • Demo

3. Virtual Organisations • Each experiment constitutes one VO • Members are defined by a VO LDAP server at NIKHEF, entries are made by an administrator • Currently each person can only belong to one VO • Each VO has one Replica Catalogue, and an area on Storage Elements to store files • Eventually VOs will also have their own Resource Brokers and Information Indices

4. VOs (2) • Currently, we have VOs for the four LHC experiments, Earth Observation, Biomedical, and iteam/wp6 • Members of a VO are mapped to a VO-based Unix group at each site • Sites should be prepared to support any VO if requested • Currently not much support for per-VO quotas, will change in the future

5. User Interface • Users need a machine on which they have a standard login account • Can use gppui.gridpp.rl.ac.uk, better to have a local machine • May be able to install UI software on a standard machine, but not yet well-tested

6. Genius Portal • Web portal developed by INFN (not an official DataGrid product) • Runs on a UI machine, gives access from anywhere with a web browser • So far only installed on a UI at Catania (needs a local login account) • Convenient for some things, but still under development • See demo later

7. What Works Now • Authorisation (getting a certificate, joining a VO, signing the usage policy) is working fairly well • Job submission is OK, although the broker is rather unstable at the moment • Jobs can be steered to find input files or other resources

8. Current Problems • Using GDMP to register files in a Replica Catalogue is quite hard at the moment (see http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/grid/versions/doc/gdmp-edg-testbed.pdf). It should be easier with GDMP v3 in Testbed 1.2 • It isn’t yet fully defined how to set up an application environment (where to find compilers, experiment software etc) at each site, but this is improving • There is no real scheme to manage disk space on Worker Nodes, users will probably assume they can write large files into the working directory

9. Current Problems (2) • There is no Replica Manager yet, files must be replicated by hand using GDMP or globus-url-copy • The testbed only includes a few sites so far, so there is no experience with a large system

10. What Are Users Doing? • So far just fairly simple tests • Experiments are planning to use the Testbed for MC challenges this year • If we get something like a stable, “production” testbed users will probably use it – build it and they will come! • Experiments have each defined a list of sites they would most like to see in the testbed - UK sites are Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lancaster, Liverpool, Oxford, RAL

11. User Support • There is a user guide on the WP6 web page (http://marianne.in2p3.fr/datagrid/documentation/EDG-Users-Guide.html) but it isn’t all that complete • There is lots of documentation, but you need to be an expert already to find what you want! • Users currently ask questions on the integration team mailing list, but this is not scalable • Local system managers need to know enough to field basic user questions • We should think about a better support structure