National
e-Science
Centre
GridPP9
e-Science Institute 4th - 5th February 04
PARTICIPANTS
Over the next three years, UK physicists will develop a computing Grid equivalent to the world's
second largest supercomputer. GridPP2 is the UK's contribution to an international collaboration
by particle physicists, aimed at analysing an imminent 'data deluge' from CERN, the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics.
In December, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council announced £16m extra
funding for the GridPP2 project. This next stage will extend the testbed across the equivalent of
20,000 1GHz personal computers in the UK. At the GridPP9 Collaboration Meeting, Steve Lloyd
presented the outcomes of peer review and set the scene for future Tier-2 planning. Tony Doyle
discussed the link between the proposed management structures incorporating the new User
Board and Deployment Board that would be responsible for coherent development and
deployment in GridPP2. Tony Cass set the scene from CERN giving the latest status of the LCG2 release, the planning underway within EGEE starting in April 2004 and the tools for fabric
management at CERN necessary for phase 2 of LCG. These talks provide an overview in
advance of the startup of GridPP2 in September 2004.
Physicists and computer scientists in the UK and CERN have been working on the original
GridPP1 project for the past three years, setting up a prototype Grid. Known as a 'testbed',
seventeen UK sites and more than a hundred computers have been used to develop the key
components of the Grid. At the GridPP9 meeting, the current status of this infrastructure was
discussed by Steve Traylen in his testbed report and discussed further by system managers
working at each of the sites in the parallel session. The importance of networking performance in
the next generation grid was stressed by Richard Hughes-Jones. The planning and structure of
the worldwide Grid Operations Centre was introduced by John Gordon, setting the work in the UK
within an International context.
This testbed is linked to other Grid testbeds worldwide, and has been tested by analysing data
from many particle physics experiments in which the UK is involved. A series of talks on the
current status of these applications were presented. These focussed on the significant
developments made by each of the experiments in pushing the Grid into useful service. Dan
Tovey stressed the need for resources for a number of smaller experiments who require access
to the Grid. The middleware deployed on the testbed largely consists of that developed in
conjunction with the EU DataGrid project, which has now completed its task and was reviewed in
terms of its effectiveness for the applications by Frank Harris.
The middleware itself has reached a point where the original open source software developed in
association with the EU DataGrid project is now being transformed into production software for
workload management, data and storage management, information services and security. A
Realisation of a Distributed Architecture (ARDA), proposed at CERN as a framework for
applications middleware was introduced by Robin Middleton and discussed at one of the parallel
session discussions. Being at NeSC enabled the work on BinX from the eDIKT project to be
presented for the first time to a large audience from a particle physics background. Overall, the
event attracted 65(?) participants to return to Edinburgh and came at a timely point in the
development of GridPP as it moves from 'prototype to production'.
Prof Tony Doyle
GridPP
University of Glasgow