F.Carminati Geneva, February 13, 2003 ALICE Offline Week F.Carminati Geneva, February 13, 2003

Agenda The agenda http://agenda.cern.ch/age?a03451 Afternoons are reserved for working together Short reports should be given the morning of the work done in the afternoon March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

LCG-1 planning The LCG-1 testbed will be deployed in June 2003 The software to be installed will be EDG and VDT A certain portion of the resources will be devoted to LCG-1 ALICE’s position is that we will use LCG-1 via our AliEn interface See during Grid day March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

Application area developments ALICE & ROOT original proposal was to base LCG software on ROOT This has been refused by the other experiments and several projects have been launched POOL for persistency, initially (?) based on ROOT I/O SEAL for base library PI for physicist interface Simulation project Strong interest in Virtual MonteCarlo and FLUKA March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

Application area developments Not a very satisfactory situation We are heavily marginalised once more A lot of manpower is wasted trying to rewrite ROOT A situation of tension that we already knew at the time of LCB is creating Few (important) things on the positive side Support for ROOT A hope to see manpower assigned to experiments Interest in the Virtual MonteCarlo and in FLUKA March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

GRID projects Very confused area Again in ALICE there is no problem A large number of competing projects but relatively very little code Very unstable code (see Cerello’s presentation during GRID day) A worrying outburst of the Stokholm syndrome Again in ALICE there is no problem AliEn is working well, it is stable and under developments It works so well that people complain bitterly because it does not do “everything”! However the relation with the GRID/LCG may become a big problem in perspective On the positive side at least one LCG person in India is working officially with AliEn March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

GRID projects EDG will finish Feb 2004 New very large projects are being prepared now EGEE in Europe (~100MEU) Trillium -- ITR in the US (same order of mag?) A welcome occasion to “harden” middleware? Or just a way of throwing more money in the wrong direction? EGEE seems to offer some reasonable chance to discuss and harmonise the different developments in the experiments I am truly convinced that AliEn can provide a lot of answers But this may be an obstacle as well as an advantage March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

EGEE Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe (how it has been presented to us) Goal create a general European Grid production quality infrastructure on top of present and future EU RN infrastructure Build on EU and EU member states major investment in Grid Technology Several pioneering prototype results Largest Grid development team in the world Goal can be achieved for about €100m/4 years on top of the national and regional initiatives Approach Leverage current and planned national and regional Grid programmes (e.g. LCG) Work closely with relevant industrial Grid developers, NRNs and US EGEE applications Geant network   March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) Three lines of funding supported (with possible budget breakdown) Networking activities (nothing to do with networks…): This is the overhead: management, coordination, dissemination and outreach (7-10% of the total funding) Specific service activities: Provision and procurement of Grid services (60% of total funding) Joint research activity Engineering development to improve the services provided by the Grid infrastructure (20% of total funding) Application support and focused R&D (10% of total funding) March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

EGEE proposal timeline Tentative Schedule (continued) EU call out on Dec 17th Draft 1: overall project structure end of February 2003 Draft 2: with detailed workpackages end of March 2003 Final proposal including admin and management end of April 2003 Submission by May 6th 2003 First feedback from EU in June-July Contract negotiation late summer, fall ’03 Contract signature by the end of ’03 Start of project Q1-Q2 ‘04 March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

ALICE Offline Development – a critical review ALICE Offline is quite different from the other offline projects Centrally managed -- no diverging lines A large part of the CORE is done at CERN However Very little help from the outside for CORE business Sometimes CERN had to “fill-in” for some important tasks The model has worked till now, but can this continue? CERN manpower is becoming more and more limited and hard to get It is perhaps time to see whether the development can be made more distributed NewIO is suffering a lot from this lack of feedback March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

Long term plans – data challenges For the moment we do not have a detailed long term planning The more important “appointments” are Computing data challenges every year with DAQ Physics data challenges 1H04, 1H06 The bulk of the work this year will be Prepare for PDC 1H04 and of also to “define” it What do we want to do? What will be the involvement of people outside Prepare for ADC 5 (1H03) Again what will be the involvment of people outside? March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week

Conclusions On the bright side, our solutions stand out as an example of simplicity, efficiency and solidity On the less bright side, the community seems to “relax” on the effort and this is worrying March 3, 2003 ALICE Offline Week