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VT VAPOR:EGI Newsletter15

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Revision as of 16:38, 31 March 2014 by Fmichel (talk | contribs)
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A large variety of tools and portals is available to assist Virtual Organisation (VO) managers and support teams in managing their community and operating the resources (GStat, SAM Nagios, CERN Experiment Dashboard, VO Operations Portal, etc.). Although generic, some of them are often designed to meet the needs of somewhat specific contexts (e.g. a large community with well established resource management policies), and their operation requires a solid IT support. But for small or newly emerging communities, starting up with the operation of a VO, apprehending the set of supporting storage and computing resources, monitoring the VO activity, dealing with the files spread out by users, are often cumbersome tasks.

VAPOR, the Vo Administration and operations PORtal, intends to help small to medium-size grid user communities to perform common VO administration and operation tasks, at a reduced human cost. Such communities may typically have no or few dedicated IT support and may use resources either in reserved or opportunistic manner. VAPOR is generic, experiment-independent, and aims at complementing existing tools such as SAM Nagios and the VO Operations Portal. VAPOR features (1) provide statistical reports and status indicators about the resources supporting a VO, and (2) facilitate the management of VO users data:

  • (1) VAPOR generates on-demand reports to (i) visualise status information of resources supporting a VO, (ii) monitor the running and waiting jobs to help detect peaks of activity and bottlenecks, (iii) monitor computing elements success rate and time response, and (iv) compute a so-called white list of computing elements to feed a job submission system.
  • (2) VO data management features provide VO administrators with the ability to (i) monitor storage elements to prevent them from feeling up, (ii) check and fix inconsistencies between the storage elements and the file catalogue (dark data, lost files), and (iii) clean-up files left behind by former users.

VAPOR has been progressively deployed during the first quarter of 2014 and now supports VOs biomed, compchem, enmr.eu, vlemed, shiwa-workflow.eu and vo.france-grilles.fr. We believe that VAPOR will help those existing communities in daily administrative and operational tasks, and will possibly enable the mutualisation of such tasks between several communities. Besides, we think that VAPOR can facilitate the outreach of new user communities by making it easier to start with the administration and operations of a VO.

In the future, VAPOR proposes to implement a users management function to (i) handle the users life-cycle workflow, interacting with external systems such as the VOMS, file catalog, EGI Apps Database etc.; (ii) track users "hidden behind" a robot certificate to have an accurate view of the actual users; (iii) track information about scientific publications to encourage users to acknowledge the usage of EGI resources.