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Experiment Support
Mandate
The Experiment Support (ES) group co-ordinates the WLCG services and assists the experiments in their use of these services.
The group consists of two sections:
Dashboards 'n' Ganga (ES-DNG)
Ganga is an easy-to-use frontend for the configuration, execution, and management of computational tasks in a variety of distributed environments including Grid, Batch and Local resources. It is an open and extensible system with specialized plugins to support ATLAS and LHCb data analysis.
The Experiment Dashboard system covers the complete range of the LHC computing activities, that is job processing, data transfer and site monitoring, across the whole WLCG infrastructure (EGI, OSG and NorduGrid).
VO Operations & Services (ES-VOS)
Help the experiments in integrating their software with grid middleware, assist them with their operations, support the persistency framework, distributed analysis and VO services/tools as part of the move to sustainable operations ("Heavy User Communities")
Services
The following services are under the responsibility of this team
| Service | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CERN GRID 2nd Line Support | IT-ES-VOS | |
| CORAL Server | IT-ES-VOS |
The CORAL server is itself a CORAL application that may connect to Oracle servers via OCI, but also to any other supported backend (e.g. MySQL servers). The results of queries may be cached in a tree of CORAL server proxies deployed between the client and the CORAL server. At present, this technology is read-only and is used in the ATLAS online system to configure the High Level Trigger farm. Work is ongoing to extend it by implementing read-write functionalities with secure authentication based on SSL and Grid certificates. |
| CRAB | IT-ES-VOS |
The CMS Remote Analysis Builder (CRAB) is a tool to allow users to run analysis jobs over distributed datasets and collect the results by hiding as far as possible the complexity of the underlying system; it can be used to execute jobs on the remote resources (the WLCG sites). |
| Data Management for LHC Experiments | IT-ES-VOS |
The IT/ES group provides support for development and integration of the LHC experiment's data management systems with the WLCG infrastructure. Dedicated efforts include: development and maintenance of the Alien file catalog for Alice, development and maintenance of ATLAS transfer agents and data management accounting system, development and maintenance of the CMS Phedex transfer agents. |
| Elog Operations | IT-ES-VOS |
The Elog operations service runs a production logging service for ATLAS and CMS which is used by shifters. |
| Experiment Dashboards | IT-ES-DNG |
Experiment Dashboards provides monitoring of the offline computing activities of the LHC experiments on the WLCG infrastructure. It covers job processing, data transfer and site commissioning and works transparently across various middleware flavours. In terms of functionality it provides multiple applications, many of them are generic are shared by several LHC experiments. In terms of implementation the Dashboard services consist of the Dashboard collectors (written in |
| GANGA | IT-ES-DNG |
Ganga is an easy-to-use frontend for the configuration, execution, and management of computational tasks in a variety of distributed environments including Grid, Batch and Local resources. It is an open and extensible system with specialized plugins to support ATLAS and LHCb data analysis. Users may interact with Ganga through a choice of interfaces: a CLI in Python, scripting or GUI. Ganga also provides integrated monitoring capabilities for jobs and tasks through a |
| HammerCloud | IT-ES-VOS |
HammerCloud is a flexible framework for testing analysis capability of Grid sites. |
| Operations Support | IT-ES-VOS |
The IT/ES group provides operational support for LHC experiments computing activities in WLCG. This covers the areas of Data Management, scheduled and chaotic data processing, information system and monitoring. |
| Persistency Framework | IT-ES-VOS |
The Persistency Framework consists of three software packages (CORAL, POOL and COOL) which are used by the LHC experiments for storing and retrieving several types of data. CORAL is a general purpose relational database client software layer, used by all of ATLAS, CMS and LHCb for accessing their conditions data stored in Oracle database servers (either directly or through Frontier or CoralServer middle-tier servers) or SQLite files. COOL is an application targeting specifically the time variation and versioning of conditions data, used by ATLAS and LHCb. |
| WLCG Service Coordination | IT-ES |
WLCG Service Coordination is a function, performed primarily by "Service Coordinators on Duty" who chair a daily WLCG operations meeting / conference call and provide regular reports to the WLCG Management Board. The main tools used include GGUS for problem reporting and tracking, the GOCDB for scheduling and announcing downtimes, the Dashboards for displaying experiment- and site-oriented monitoring information and a set of Key Performance Indicators used to monitor the quality of the service delivered both on the short as well as longer term. |