Face2Face Meeting at CERN on 2007/03/14

Discussion Topics

• Proposal of a new coordinated Activity GIN-Accounting
  Many of the Grid project contributing to GIN are faced with the need of having a Grid wide accounting system which allows an exchange of accounting information. The UR-WG and the RUS-WG are defining standard recommendations on the format of data to be exchanged and on the interface to be used for a standardized exchange.
  At present, Grid projects have not yet the need of exchanging across Grid boundaries. Nevertheless, a focus team GIN-Accounting could start working as a liaison between Grid projects and between Grid projects and software developers in order to facilitate the use of interoperable accounting systems which would be able to exchange accounting information across Grids when needed in the (possibly near) future.

• Data staging, data access from jobs
  Data staging and data access for jobs is certainly a self-evident requirement. But how can data storage facilities accessed across Grid boundaries, when there are so many different (SRM, SRB, DCACHE, GPFS, ...) currently deployed in the various Grid projects? How can a user find out if his job will be able to access the needed storage facility? Can this also be automated? Can this be made interoperable?
• Reliable file transfer
  The GIN-Data activity proved that data can be exchanged across Grid boundaries using GridFTP. A natural step forward is clearly the introduction of RTF.

• worker node profile; community software areas
  Jobs running on execution hosts expect run-time environments beyond the requirement of a certain operating system (flavor). These could be e.g. special scientific libraries or complete software packages. Furthermore, user communities like to share software developed and/or user by them, e.g. a user community uses a special version of CPMD which is should for licensing issues only available to exactly this community. The problem here is, how can such software repositories be set up? How can they be accessed across Grid boundaries? Can Licensing issues be solved without contacting a lawyer?
• Applications

• Common clients
  Users and possibly their jobs make direct use of a Grid infrastructure. The diversity of middleware to be used is steadily increasing. Can a set of common client applications be defined which a user can use as a standard and which are available at all participating Grid infrastructures?

• Root of trust for VOs/definition of VOs
  How can Grid projects trust a particular VO? Can VOs be defined outside of Grid projects as a kind of global VOs? Should they be tied to CAs rather than to a particular Grid project? Those are questions which should be answered by this activity.

• Tests systems (compliance testing)
• Performance

• Monitoring
• Metadata

TODO

• Improving the definition of the above items
• Prioritizing the above items
• Identifying leaders
• Adding missing items