Climbing Everest

The slides should appear soon on the web page - the mountain themed programme labelled us Everest, the second highest mountain on the agenda.
Apart from the lovely fresh air and hills and outdoorsy activities, GridPP25 was also an opportunity to persuade the experiments (and not just the LHC ones) to give us feedback and discuss future directions - we'll try to collate this and follow up. We are also working on developing "services" which seem to be useful, eg checking integrity of files, or consistency between catalogues and the storage elements. And of course for us to meet face to face and catch up over a be coffee

OSG storage group

I was in a meeting yesterday with the OSG data storage and management group. I had realised that there was some activity going on in the US regarding this, but didn't know just how many people are involved, or what precisely they were doing. Turns out that there is actually quite a few FTEs looking at dCache 1.8 testing, client tools, deployment scripts, bug reports and support. There is clearly quite an overlap with what we try to do in GridPP, although there are a couple of differences:

1. GridPP has only me (and part of Jens) dedicated to storage. The rest comes from the community of site admins that have signed up to the mailing list. This works well, but it would be good if there were others who could dedicate more time to looking at storage issues. There were previously a couple of positions at RAL for this stuff. Hopefully there will be again in GridPP3.

2. Unlike GridPP, OSG is not dedicated to particle physics, hence they support other user communities. It appears that USATLAS and USCMS take on the lions share of support for storage at US Tier-2 sites.

You can find more information here:

https://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Storage/