Meeting Notes for 9 December 2009

Common

• ELabs servers cannot send email; Argonne shut down the old SMTP server. We have an MCS helpdesk ticket open
• ANL has nagios - we should set up monitoring of postfix
• Add Phong to the help@i2u2.org mailing list
• Discussion on whether to allow students to directly access out helpdesk
  • Bob thinks things are pretty good now
  • Mihael calls teachers 'Tier 1' and Bob's helpdesk 'Tier2'.

Grid

• Dave Ritchie and Laura Mengel are in the communications group of the Computing Division
• How can we use OSG resources that exist at Fermilab? OSG would like to bring benefits of the grid.
• OSG vs. TeraGrid
  • OSG requires a fairly OSG-specific stack compared to TeraGrid, etc.
• Certificate issues
  • Presently requires each user to have a unique certificate
  • ELabs does not want to put a certificate on user machines due to usability, security lockdown, etc.
  • Nanowire uses a pool of certificates that can be automatically lent to a logged-in user and then returned on logout
  • Other solutions? Portal itself has a "community" portal or we use some sort of proxy.
• We need to get usability up (production-quality) in the context of limited-time for students
  • Queuing issues - if we send 5-10 minute jobs they can't be prioritized
• Why gridify?
  • We would get more resources
• Have students ask the questions "where do we want to run?"

More Iron?

• Get some OSG/TeraGrid nodes dedicated to us in the short-term (cloud-compute versus grid).

CMS

• For looking at the physics, presently running OGRE at ND.
• New physics - looking at where events take place (and MC data has a 300 µm x-axis offset)
• Look at the momentum/energy study

Cosmic

LIGO