26 January 2007

Day 5: Final day at the workshop and the agenda is made up of experiment talks covering their plans for data management come switch on of the LHC. It seems to me that their is still a lot of uncertainty about how the experiments will use SRM 2.2 and what their local data access patterns/methods will be. This uncertainty is partly caused by the fact that the SRM 2.2 implementations are not complete yet and that each storage system has its own idea about how best to provide the 2.2 functionality. Subsequently this means that the sites (particularly the Tier-1s) don't know how to optimally configure their storage systems for use by the experiments. CMS are even talking about not requiring the use of space tokens and reservation at all... Hopefully the new storage systems working group will be able to bring everyone together and cook up some site and VO-specific recipes for storage configuration. It has to be noted that these systems must be flexible enough to grow over a period of a few years as the data comes in from the LHC.

Also, Graeme found some more issues with rfio access to DPM. We will need to work with the developers in order that we can really understand what is going on. It's a good job that we started this testing just now.

OK, that's it from the workshop. Back to reality and storage phone conferences next week. I'll make sure that I send out the details before Wednesday. As usual, let me know if there are any problems.

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