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Upcoming OSG Events

WLCG Collaboration Workshop
September 1-2, 2007
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

NorduGrid 2007
Septemer 24-28, 2007
 Copenhagen, Denmark

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  • EVENTS OUTSIDE OF OSG
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    Documentation Meeting Summary

    Anne Heavey
    Several of us met last week to address the OSG technical documentation and
    to plan how the documentation activity will fit in with the EOT and
    integration activities in year 2. There had been some lively discussion in the users meeting on this topic. The buzz boiled over to this one, and

    produced agreement on how to move forward.


    We plan to direct readers of all stripes to a “documentation hub”, from which they will (ideally) be able to navigate to the information they need, easily and with repeatable results.  The hub will contain stable links to release documentation, and guide readers through it.  In turn, we plan to clarify each of the release documents prior to OSG 0.8.0.


    The EOT activity will continue to produce tutorials separate from the standard documentation. A site admin school will be added in year 2, as will a self-paced online course for end users.

    ~ Anne Heavey
    Supported By

     

    		  
    From the Executive Director

    Ruth Pordes
    This special issue of OSG News reports on the three OSG technical workshops held in the last few weeks. These metings focused on gettineg feedback about and input from three important areas of our work:  Users and applications developers, site administrators and education and documentation.  Meeting face-to-face, help us achieve our technical goals for the coming months.

    Many thanks go to the organizers of these workshops: Rob Gardner, Chris Green, Anne Heavey,  Rob Quick, Abhishek Rana and Alain Roy for making them lively and productive affairs.

    ~ Ruth Pordes

    Building a Site Admin Community

    Rob Gardner
    Alain Roy
    Rob Quick
    Many OSG site administrators gathered at Fermilab this past week to discuss ways to improve overall value at their sites to the OSG users. The two-day meeting kick-started the formation of an OSG site admin community through presentations, discussions and networking.

    “There was a lot of enthusiasm and agreement that a community forum is needed,” said Rob Gardner of the University of Chicago . “Many of these people hadn't met before and hadn't been benefiting from others' experiences.”

    In addition to detailed talks on a variety of site services, the Lightning Talks (5 minute presentations highlighting a problem and solution) proved to be well-suited to the meeting's aim. These gave listeners the opportunity to pick and choose issues of interest, and to seek out details during discussions and breaks.

    “I found it interesting that three of the four lightning talks focused on different approaches to a single problem – recovering from the failure of a CE node,” mused Alain Roy, the software coordinator for the OSG facility. “It's good for us [the OSG facility] to know how much it's occurring, so that we can address it.”

    Bill Strossman from UC Riverside came prepared with questions, and is going home with answers and more ideas. He plans to implement some additional features of Condor, and has ideas for improving his GUMS configuration. In addition, he said, “Miron's talk [Miron Livny, of UW Madison] gave me an idea of how to create an LDAP database starting with a script I got from Terence [Martin, of UCSD] a while back and hadn't used.”

    Terence didn't leave empty-handed either, discovering innovative ways to use GUMS to resolve user names on the worker nodes. He also contributed a service. “Miron mentioned that it would be nice to have stats on how proxies are used," said Terence. "I've just finished code to do this! I spent some time this morning getting it deployed.”

    Attendees agreed that the real value of the meeting was in the discussions, the opportunity to network with experienced resource admins, and the plan to continue the exchange of ideas through monthly phone meetings and occasional meetings of this same kind.

    And it's good to be reminded that Miron's inspirational quality, an OSG cornerstone, is alive and well. “I like his style,” quipped Strossman.

    ~ Anne Heavey
    		 
    Users' Meeting

    Chris Green

    Abhishek Singh
    Rana
    Around fifty OSG members, partners and prospective members attended the OSG Users' Meeting at Fermilab July 26th and 27th. Its focus was on enabling users to take an active role in OSG processes by sharing issues and solutions; discourse was encouraged throughout the meeting.

    Prominent themes included:

    • Storage issues: getting data to the right place and making sure mechanisms are in place to get temporary storage easily.
    • Workload management: use of pilot jobs and meta-scheduling systems is expected to increase. How will sites be affected? Which tools should be used?
    • Message Passing Interface: making MPI available via the OSG interface is challenging. A significant number of non-physics applications would be interested if MPI were available.
    • Advertisement: keeping site information current and accurately advertising the resources available.

    “What's interesting is that there were some groups that I was not aware of that were very interested in using MPI,”says Mats Rynge of the Renaissance Computing Institute and part of the OSG Engagement Activity. Mats gave a presentation and also presented a report about the current state of MPI within the OSG.

    “A meeting like this with so much discussion is very useful," Mats continues. "There were a lot of people I did not know beforehand, and I got an overview of what was happening behind the curtains.”

    ~Chris Green