Activity Management: what for?

EGEE-III INFSO-RI-222667

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE

www.eu-egee.org

EGEE and gLite are registered trademarks

Antonio Retico

EGEE 08 Istanbul - 24 Sep 2008

Activity Management: what for?



Question

• Why this talk?

2EGEE08 - Istanbul - 22/28 Sept 2008



Because …

• Sites working in Pilots have already received a number of ‘tasks’ from the LCG Savannah tracker

• PPS Sites and ROCs have been bothered recently by several “administrative circulars” I sent out– Changes in the site registration procedure– Request to verify the correctness of a “site/activity registry” in a

PPS webpage (www.cern.ch/index.php?dir=./panel/SVC/)

• I give here some answers to FAQs on these topics

• More and more questions welcome after the talk

EGEE08 - Istanbul - 22/28 Sept 2008 3



Question

• Aren’t the Savannah tasks an unnecessary complication of our day-to-day work?




The purpose of the tasks

• The idea is to use completed tasks as logs of the effort spent in PPS activities throughout the regions

• Expected benefits:– ROCs can better monitor their PPS allocations– PPS partners can have a better idea of the actual cost of an activity

before committing to it– better load balancing in the assignment of tasks– ... the 1000+ advantages of having good accounting records

• Ideally we would like all the PPS activities covered by formal tasks

• Several technical reasons to choose Savannah– Easy to link tasks with release objects (patches, bugs)– A well-populated user database (we are almost all there)– Libraries developed in EGEE to extract statistics from tasks

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The desired Output


• Effort (in PersonXhours) spent in the regions for the Cream Pilot



Other views


• Distribution of effort in time for DECH ROC (Cream Pilot)



Other views


• Distribution of effort in PPS by Service Area



More on tasks

• The effort credited for each task is pre-defined– Values referenced in the PPS Service Description

(https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LCG/PreProductionServiceDescription )

• The task owner can change it if needed• The re-actualisation of the task “values” will be useful

in future planning and assignments• The data model supports different weights for tasks

related to different middleware services (currently not applied)




Question

• How do you represent with tasks the supply of a continuous service? (e.g. submission of SAM tests)




Extremely good question

• Service contributions, such are the operation of a general-purpose support service are associated to integrated “service tickets”

• Service tickets:– Task: run the service X for 1 month– Start: January– Due: February– Effort: 8PH

• Soon after closure you receive another “timesheet” for March




Question

• Why do we need yet another registry for PPS?




Non-homogeneity of PPS sites

• Traditionally, we used the GOCDB as registry for PPS sites. This is not sufficient with the introduction of “Pilot Services” as a new PPS feature

• The “logical” PPS may include resources at production and pre-production sites (identified by the BDII they use and the GOCDB flag)– Rough distinction: PPS sites are used mostly for deployment

test, production ones mostly for pilots

• To group them together, we needed either a new flag in GOCDB for all sites or a separate registry. We opted for the 2nd




Comment

• AAARRRGHHH! You duplicate information !!




Nope

• The pieces of information stored in the PPS registry mostly deal with mapping of sites (or teams) with pre-defined work packages in PPS (specialties)

• Used for:– Creation and assignment of tasks– Quick identification of candidates for staffing new pilot services

• More info eventually imported from external sources– GOCDB Site contact info– gLite repository Service list

• GOCDB still the master for site info– No changes in site registration procedure for ROCs– The site/activity mapping in the PPS registry is currently

performed by the PPS coordinator at PPS–registration time




Question

• Who maintains the registry?




Maintainers of the registry

• Currently the registry is centrally maintained in the jurisdiction of the ‘PPS Support’ Area with mandate from the ‘PPS Coordination’

• Technically run by CERN_PPS staff on behalf of ‘PPS Support’

• (in other words, it’s me )




Question

• Isn’t that a step towards centralisation as opposed to regionalisation?




Ahaha! I knew you’d’ve asked

• The whole activity management framework is under development

• Externalisation still premature (but I am looking forward to it)

• An adequate authentication and authorisation mechanism still needed– I envisage an organisational structure similar to the VOMRS

“representatives”

• Before extending the tool let’s see if the principle works




Question

• What am I supposed to do in order to work in pre-deployment testing of gLite-DPM?




To become a pre-deployer

• Make sure you are in a PPS site– GOCGB.ProductionStatus=PPS– if not you need to register one through your ROC

• Inform the MPS Coordinator (or whoever in [email protected]) and ask to be registered for pre-deployment of the DPM

• Wait for testing tasks to arrive and follow them up




Question

• What if I want to be involved in a pilot of WMS?




Registration for pilots (MPS)

• You still have to register for the activity

• To register means to commit to contribute in the eventuality a pilot be started

• Pilots are rare, so you might be idle for long periods before receiving tasks

• Sites willing to work in PPS with continuity should subscribe also to work packages within MQS and Support




For Further Reading

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• The PPS registry (Who is doing What)

www.cern.ch/index.php?dir=./panel/SVC/

• The PPS Activity Management Pagehttps://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LCG/PreProductionServiceDescription

• WLCG/EGEE Pre Production: Service Description (EGEEIII)www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./ActivityManagement/

SA1DeploymentTaskTracking/

• All Available on the PPS web site

www.cern.ch/pps

EGEE08 - Istanbul - 22/28 Sept 2008


EGEE-III INFSO-RI-222667 25

Questions?

EGEE08 - Istanbul - 22/28 Sept 2008

Activity Management: what for?

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