15 September 2008

Update on CASTOR infoprovider deployment

It should have been done quite a few weeks ago, when we discussed it in a CASTOR experiments meeting, but deployment was postponed first when the 6.022*(10**23) bug hit (without stagers, the dynamic information provider is not terribly useful), and then I was away for some weeks for GridPP and AHM and suchlike.

So the new infoprovider is now rescheduled for deployment at 23.09.08 at 09:00 BST. Dutyadmin will schedule a short at-risk period for CASTOR.

The new provider will publish also "unreachable" storage spaces, e.g. disk pools with no space token descriptions, according to WLCG GDB accountingforeverythingism. Moreover, it will
abu^W use the "reserved space" attribute to publish whether space has been "reserved" for a VO. Not to be confused with SRM reservedSpace.

Note that like the previous versions, this one publishes only online (disk) space. A version that publishes nearline (tape) is in the pipeline but not with a high priority.

Currently discussions are ongoing whether it is appropriate to publish space as "reserved" (in the sense above) if it has no space token descr. I publish it in the version which will go out next week, but there is a development version which doesn't.

This version of the information provider was given to CERN and (INFN or ASGC) back in August, but it is not known whether they have deployed it.

14 September 2008

Storage@GridKa school of computing

The GridKa school of computing was last week. There are a few storage related talks which you can find on the agenda.

* I gave an overview talk about storage on the Grid.

* There was a dCache tutorial session which gave a good summary of all things SRM2.2.

* Sun Microsystems had some stuff to say about Lustre and pNFS (not the dCache PNFS!).

There were also presentations about local user analysis and a session on ROOT/PROOF (which is closely related to local analysis work, although not in the Grid-storage sense). For some reason the material for those talks is not available yet. You can see the full agenda here.