Summary of data management meeting Monday, March 8th, 2004 16:00 Bat 2-R030
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Present: N.Brook, P.Charpentier, J.Closier, M.Frank, R.Graciani, 
         G.Kutznetsov, J.Saborido, A.Tsaragorotzev, R.Vizcaya

Workload Management System (Andrei, Ian, Vincent):
- Accounting is getting integrated
- Jobs register the output files into the file catalog themself
  - Is this good ? 
  - What if the catalog is down ?
  - Can the information be recovered ?
- Known limits
  - Not more than 32 k jobs due to number of I/O sandboxes
  - Solution: Moved sandboxed as blobs into the WMS database
- Integration of job logic:
  - All steps are executable as a test last week showed.
  - The agent will have to be modified in order to
    backup bookkeeping and file catalog updates in the event
    the services are temporarily not availible

Monitoring and accounting (Ricardo):
- Access to the bookkeeping database is possible now.
- Tests using data from last year's data challenge will start 
  this week.
- WMS is already populating the accounting database
- Work to produce graphics output is ongoing.

Data Management tools & hardware (Joel/Andrei):
- The access of castor files from LCG2 and vice versa is working,
  but only if the files are copied. RFIO access is currently not 
  supported. Documentation is sparse.
- Alien file catalog is now running on Lxgate05. Alien is changing
  and so frequent updates have to be done. Andrei complained that
  the support of IT for this machine is suboptimal.
- The recipes to synchronize LCG RLS and AliEn are now known, an
  implementation to automatize this must be done.
- Other action items:
  - data replication tools

Production database/XML catalog/bookkeeping (Markus):
- Prototype to generate XML catalog slices is implemented.
  Missing is proper error handling with reasonable messages 
  if invoked from the command line.
- Andrei will send a job python-file to Markus to be implemented 
  in the production database.
- The read-only interface to the file-catalog residing in the 
  bookkeeping database should have the same RPC interface as Andrei
  implemented it for the Alien file catalog. He will send the
  interface to Markus for implementation.

- Database accounts (Francoise):
  The database accounts are created on devdb9. For the production
  database it was agreed to have several project accounts.


Minutes:
Markus Frank