Post-event Report
Workshop: Towards an Induction
Course for the National Grid Service
9 - 10 December 2004
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/522/
Edited by Mike Mineter
National e-Science Centre
15 South College Street
Edinburgh
Version 1
11 December 2004
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
1
Contents
Purpose of report........................................................................................................3
Participants.................................................................................................................3
Summary of workshop...............................................................................................4
Outline of induction course as agreed by participants ...........................................4
Portals and portlets.................................................................................................5
Practicals ................................................................................................................6
Links between trainers and others in GOSC..........................................................7
Actions arising .......................................................................................................7
Appendix 1 – Training for the NGS Mike Mineter ...................................................8
Role of training in establishing effective users of a production service ................8
Induction course.....................................................................................................9
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
2
Purpose of report
Distribution: to participants in NGS / GOSC.
Status: Participants are invited to submit additional notes or corrections to
mjm@nesc.ac.uk.
The primary purpose of the report is to circulate notes that were agreed during the
workshop; these have been transcribed with minimal editing, intended only to add
clarity.
The appendix includes text from the briefing notes sent before the event, and from the
presentation on training: these set a context against which the summary can perhaps
be better understood. A couple of comments have been included in the appendix on
the need to drop the EGEE induction material from the NGS induction.
Participants
Thanks to all participants: especially those who responded to the call for “potential
users with an adventurous spirit”, and those who gave presentations.
Bernadette Boyle
Steven Pickering
Edward Boyle
Stephen Pickles
Dharmesh Chohan
Andrew Richards
Matt Ford
Jennifer Schopf
Kevin Haynes
Steve Thorne
Noel Kelly
David Wallom
Mark Meenan
Guy Warner
David Meredith
Xiaobo Yang
Mike Mineter
Participants included:
•
Members of GOSC
o Operations
o Intending trainers
•
Potential users and application developers
•
Potential resource providers
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
3
Summary of workshop
Outline of induction course as agreed by participants
•
(Explain goals of the course)
•
Why might you want to use the NGS?
•
–
Vision (NGS and the UK e-Science programme)
–
Present resources
–
What can a user do, how can it help in research?
Demos / Case studies
–
•
What do current users gain from NGS?
Obtaining Access
–
Certification
–
Application / getting account on NGS, acceptable use policy
•
Portal (Hands on)
•
Using the NGS/Globus command line walkthrough
– Login using GSISSH
•
•
–
User environment
–
Command line job control, begin with simple /bin/date
•
globus-job-run
•
globus-job-submit
–
GridFTP
–
Compiling and then running a simple “Hostname” app
–
“Many job submission” via MPI/script
(benefit from Resource Broker noted)
Data services
–
SRB
–
OGSA-DAI
–
Oracle
Support
–
GOSC
–
Documentation
•
Persistency of services [i.e. if users develop for current middleware, they will
remain supported]
•
Status/Monitoring tools
•
Services -> site matching [editors note: what was this?!]
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
4
•
Gotchas
•
Next steps / contacts/ further training
•
–
What else can NGS do for you / your project ?
–
How users, Application Developers, resource providers engage with
NGS
–
Schedule of further courses
Future of NGS – outline of up-coming changes (middleware, portal …)
Notes:
•
Emphasis is on practicals (when feasible)
•
Initial (Sept 04) plans to base NGS induction on EGEE induction needed to be
re-thought due to the different software stacks.
•
The middleware is planned to change, with possible additional services and
WS-based middleware. The timing of these changes is neither clear nor under
NGS control, for example, being subject to the release of software from
others. This has consequences that include a need for liaison between trainers
and others in GOSC, to allow courses to induct participants both into current
and also imminent middleware.
•
We can learn from the Teragrid training
–
http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/index.html
Portals and portlets
Dharmesh Chohan gave talks, a demo and a practical. In discussion concerning the
induction course, the following was agreed:
•
Goal of NGS portal
–
To provide collaborative research environment
•
Perform basic Grid operations
–
•
–
Encourage / aid communication
Generic tools
•
•
Job submission, data transfer,…
To aid initial use - could be taken and developed by building
on top of these
Strategies for users in new projects
–
Establish a project work site on the portal
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
5
•
–
Customisation could include links to other web sites (other
portals)
Projects could customise a distribution of code from NGS
•
Why?
–
Project specific reasons
»
–
•
•
firewall issues related to gridFTP, cited as an
example
on a project-by-project basis after liaison with portal
team
•
Code will not be made readily available for general download
•
No licence problems
•
Issues for NGS if projects take the portal code:
–
change branding from NGS
–
other than for NGS portlets, in this case there would be
no support from NGS.
Long-term options:
–
use NGS portlets in project’s portals, under emerging portal standards
–
Use of VOMS by NGS could add requirements/functionality to the
NGS portal
Feedback is wanted from projects to NGS portal
–
for new generic portlets
•
NGS can’t routinely host projects’ portlets – that is neither scalable nor
resourced
•
Single sign-on with x509 – functionality that is en route
•
The portal should be used in induction courses
–
Portal would continue to be run from DL during courses
–
Likely that induction lasts 2 days and day 1 uses portal; day 2 uses
CLI
Practicals
•
Certificates - options
–
–
Use test certificates - 2day lifespan?
•
Decision needed by NGS – is this possible?
•
Note – early courses will (we assumed) have to use NGS
hardware
Use UK certificates??
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
6
•
Participants would have to request certificates in advance of the
course, and bring them
–
Security risks if participants bring UK Cert. with them;
training is needed to establish safe practices.
–
Some participants won’t do that anyway!
•
Problems with CA dominate helpdesk queries
•
Min. time to issue a certificate is 1 hour
–
–
•
Implies complications if on-the-spot certification was
attempted
Andy to explore test certificate possibilities for NGS
Further options will open when t-Infrastructure is available
–
“t-infrastructure” is a grid isolated from the NGS for training
–
It must be able to run either current or imminent software stacks
–
Could have its own dummy certifaction, as does GILDA.
(https://gilda.ct.infn.it)
•
Course to have series of walk-thru’s/exercises of increasing complexity, some
with portals, some CLI.
Links between trainers and others in GOSC
Now that the NGS is providing a service, NeSC is preparing to train for the NGS, and
the need for a training programme is growing, it is timely to build stronger links
between trainers and others in GOSC:
•
Trainers developing courses
–
need access to some support
–
could be viewed as early users of new releases
•
GOSC members (and willing participants from this workshop) will be asked
by trainers to review training material as it is prepared.
•
Helpdesk could give feedback to trainers, to address recurrent problems
•
Documentation – trainers could review draft new user documentation
•
As T-Infrastructure is established, trainers will need support in obtaining and
installing the software.
[ Editors note: The intention is that once courses are stable, then early trainers will
establish repositories of material and train additional trainers, so that the loads on
GOSC support and also any individual trainers will be controlled.]
Actions arising
•
NeSC
–
preparing dry-run of induction
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
7
–
NGS requested that NeSC provides a training schedule that includes
follow-on courses (These are intended by NeSC, but not yet scheduled)
•
Andy – exploring options for certificates in courses, to establish the NGS
view
•
Matt, David– to look locally for case studies for use in induction
Mike to explore finding similar from EGEE
•
Stephen, Mike – establish links between trainers and others in GOSC;
•
NGS will take actions to inform users about courses:
•
–
Link from NGS web site to NeSC training pages
–
Also use NGS announce list
–
Add link/question about induction training when people get accounts
Dharmesh, Mike – to explore use of NGS portal for collaboration in training
development.
Appendix – Training for the NGS
Mike Mineter
This Appendix includes notes from the briefing document sent round before the
workshop, from the talk on training at the Workshop, along with a couple of further
thoughts.
Role of training in establishing effective users of a production
service
•
NGS Goal is to have many effective and active users in many locations
•
Technology is supported by a small number of people
•
Training helps to make this feasible and scalable (European Data Grid proved
that – training became an important activity, but one that was not initially
planned)
o Without training, even with a production-quality, sustainable, reliable
NGS, the danger would be that support staff would be overloaded, and
users disoriented and then disillusioned
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
8
Figure 1 The role of training in enabling effective use of a production Grid
Notes on the figure:
•
“VO” implies that user communities (virtual organisations) should in time be
able to help support and train their own members.
•
“Consultancy” implies that after training, participants will have people who
can continue to give support – for example to help strategies for a project to
be determined, application to be ported. Induction courses should ideally be
run where that follow-up is available – and so it is expected that courses will
primarily be run with e-science centres who are able to give that support.
Induction course
•
All training courses need specific goals, leaving participants on a clear path.
(That distinguishes training from dissemination.)
•
Induction is to orient potential new..
o Users so they can understand the NGS, and make preliminary plans for
ƒ
Grid-enabling their VO (data, code,…)
ƒ
Further training needs exist (APIs, job/data services, portal
development)
o Site managers/ sysadmin deciding whether or how to run resource
centres
ƒ
installation, admin courses will also be needed
In September, it was expected that the EGEE induction would be the basis of the NGS
induction (supplemented by NGS specifics). This is not the case – that was agreed in
the Workshop. The following states my understanding. Using the NGS entails
coding/scripting/CLI with the low-level tools provided by VDT, SRB and OGSADAI. In the workshop there was some discussion of the lack of:
1. support for multiple VOs. The NGS is in effect one VO at present; resources
can not be restricted to one VO.
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
9
2. a resource broker. Users submit jobs to specific compute nodes using GRAM;
a higher interface is needed.
3. a User Interface component – in EGEE terminology – the machine that a user
accesses by a portal or via ssh, to issue commands to the middleware; its
where the proxy certificate is created, and user files can be stored. Without it,
the effort for a new user is much greater, and accounts on compute nodes need
to be synchronised, or files held on SRB. Options discussed, not reaching any
conclusions, included
a. Knoppix – to easily and quickly load a UI-like image to a machine.
This was also discussed as a possible way to establish a local training
grid. (It something NeSC will explore, as Knoppix is now used for the
UI machine in the EGEE GILDA-based tutorial.)
b. Establishing a series of “UI” machines available as a part of the NGS.
c. Adding (unidentified) functionality to the portal.
d. [Could the Java Web Start approach, as used to upload a certificate to
MyProxy, be useful? ]
These issues, from the training viewpoint, result in:
a) the EGEE induction being irrelevant
b) the need case studies, to illustrate what the NGS offers users.
As background, ome of the EGEE induction is in the following few figures (see
http://egee.nesc.ac.uk for details):
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
10
Major components
“User
interface”
interface”
Input “sandbox”
Replica
Catalogue
Information
Service
DataSets info
Output “sandbox”
bS
ta
tu
s
Jo
Job Status
CE i
nf
o
Publish
Logging &
BookBook-keeping
Job Query
Job Submit Event
Author.
&Authen.
SE &
o
Inf
er
rok
+B
x”
bo
”
nd
ox
db
“sa
ut
san
t“
Inp
tpu
Ou
Resource
Broker
Storage
Element
Computing
Element
Middleware components in EGEE - 10
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
11
Workshop report: Towards an Induction Course for the NGS v1.0
12