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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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