Deploying Production Grids – Beyond the Hype

• Introduction to Workshop - Jamie Shiers, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
• Reprocessing D0 Data with SAMGrid - Frederic Villeneuve-Seguier, Imperial College, London, UK
• Belle Data Grid - from Testbed to National Grid Deployment - Lyle Winton, University of Melbourne, Australia
• APAC Grid - John O'Callaghan, APAC, Australia
• Deployment of an LCG infrastructure in Australia - Marco La Rosa, University of Melbourne, Australia
• UNOSAT and Geant4: Experiences of their merge in the LCG environment - Patricia Mendez Lorenzo, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland and CNAF, Bologna, Italy

It is hard to escape from the grid-hype these days – from the scientific to the commercial world, grids are being advertised as the “magic bullet” answer to virtually all computing problems. But what is the reality beyond the hype? Are these things as easy to use as they claim, with their boasts of “seamless access” to the “unlimited computing and storage resources of a giant super-computer”? Whatever the real answer, there are clearly many lessons in common from the vast array of grids currently being deployed and in operation. The purpose of this workshop is to focus on the key issues that people face when trying to deploy and use production grids. To be truly useful, submissions should be as open and honest about problems faced, successes and failures, key messages for the community and so forth.

The purpose of this workshop is to focus on the concrete issues – primarily from a deployment / service point of view, but also in terms of ease-of-use – of Grids. It is specifically not intended to focus on “marketing success stories”, but the nitty-gritty issues that we face in our daily work and need to address and overcome if Grids are ever to become ubiquitous.

Specific topics that you may wish to address include:

• What has been achieved so far by grids in operation? Focus here would be on actual usage by VOs - hard numbers produced by grid accounting or VOs themselves. What are the measurable benefits (what has been possible with the grid that was not feasible before)? How is utilization changing with time? What has been achieved in terms of data management and resource scheduling?
• Technical problems encountered. What have been the major setbacks and why do the currently deployed grids not have more users. This is very broad and may require sub-areas of users, middleware, fabric and general deployment.
• Standards and interoperation. How well have these areas progressed.
  What are the main obstacles? In the hype world each development integrates seamlessly but in reality groups use different schemas, authentication mechanisms and so on.
• Sociological issues. Formulating widely accepted acceptable use and security policies may come under general deployment but there are broader issues to do with sites opening up their resources to unknown users. The "hype" suggests it is easy to openly share resources but it requires huge shifts in working practice for traditionally closed sites and their administrators.

Important dates:

Abstracts of no more than 3 pages in length describing issues related to the workshop theme are solicited. No particular formatting for the abstracts is required - they should be submitted by e-mail to the workshop chair, Jamie Shiers.

Accepted papers must conform to the formatting instructions for the full conference and available here.

Understanding that this is a very dynamic field, submissions describing Work in Progress are also solicited. To encourage discussion, it is foreseen that a number of panel sessions will be organised, covering these and other relevant submissions.

Organising Committee

Jeremy Coles, J.Coles@rl.ac.uk, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK

Flavia Donno, Flavia.Donno@cern.ch, INFN, Italy

Marco La Rosa, mlarosa@physics.unimelb.edu.au, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Simon Lin, Simon.Lin@cern.ch, Academica Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

John O’Callaghan, John.OCallaghan@apac.edu.au, Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing

Jamie Shiers, Jamie.Shiers@cern.ch, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, +41227674928 (workshop chair)

Heinz Stockinger, Heinz.Stockinger@univie.ac.at, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Kurt Stockinger, KStockinger@lbl.gov, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, USA