UK Campus Grid Special Interest Group Dr. David Wallom University of Oxford

Agenda Who are we Aims Outputs Events

Who Chaired by –David Wallom, Oxford –Clare Gryce, UCL Members so far… –Reading, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge, KCL, Liverpool, Lancaster, Newcastle, OMII, Birmingham (in no particular order!)

Aims of the SIG? Group for the promotion of Campus Grid facilities throughout the UK academic community Solidify best practice throughout the UK community Groundwork for larger collaboration including regional grids Representation of Campus Grid providers at e-Science Directors meeting

The story so far 1st meeting in Oxford, 16th April –Presentations from each campus grid represented –Discussion of top issues facing campus grid providers fEC & Business models User Interfaces Middleware and software evolution 2nd meeting over Access Grid, 28th June –Presentation on the OMII roadmap 3rd Meeting at UK e-Science AHM, 10th September –Presentation of first draft of OMII requirements documents

OMII Requirements Document Give OMII a concrete list of developments needed by our community Separated into five areas –Applications –Security –Accounting –Monitoring –Storage

Storage, Jon Blower Support reading/writing from/to SRB systems as these appear to be fairly widely used Some groups appear to be moving towards WebDAV-based systems so it is recommend that OMII consider supporting this. SFTP/SCP is also commonly used - I think this might already be supported but if it isn't, this would be very useful. This will be available to lots of users on Campus (since they can access files on any server they can SSH to) so might be a good fallback even where other options are available. Filesystem-based solutions (e.g. AFS, Parrot) are independent of middleware and so are probably not important for OMII.

Accounting, David Wallom Driven by –fEC –Tracing of resources donated to show fare share usage, especially as we move towards inter-institutional sharing and regional grids Important that this be auditable Standards based OMII should develop a lightweight RUS server and client set –Independent of platform and requires no external software e.g. Tomcat etc. –Includes more than just processing usage but storage and services

Security, Ian Bland Users do not like using grid certificates, –prefer the same authentication method as they used for more traditional computing/IT system. –mainly SSO systems such as Kerberos but increasingly Shibboleth. OMII should actively support the inclusion of Shibboleth support for middleware system. Support for authentication via SSO systems needs to be matched with support for authorisation via directory services, notably LDAP. Integrity issues for the users are that data sets are consistent and not corrupt and that code will execute in a precise manner the need for a trusted platform extends to one that is robust and cannot be compromised. This is something OMII should consider, possibly in the context of a trusted computing platform.

Monitoring, Mark Calleja GridSAM to provide a means of monitoring running jobs through connectivity to the underlying scheduler/system –through providing a standard view of the contents of the scratch space on a remote resource –Through being able to pipe on request stdout/stderr

HTC Workshop National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh 26th - 30th November Including –Condor –United Devices (possibly!) –Digipede Attendance from users, vendors and IT managers Practical demonstrations and exercises as well as talks on research that has been made possible using HTC

Future meeting topics Visualization –Talk by RAVE team Networks –Connecting high performance networks –Firewall settings –Network performance Access Methods –Portals NGS Application Repository Application Hosting Environment –Standard command line applications –API Single Sign-on and common authentication for disparate components Energy usage and tools…

Communication Website – Maillist

Grid Data Storage UK