Table of Contents Executive Summary 3

3.4Integration and Site Coordination

The major focus was preparations for OSG 1.2, the golden release for the LHC restart. Beginning in April 2009, the 3-site Validation Test Bed (VTB) was used repeatedly to perform installation, configuration and functional testing of (pre-releases) of VDT across three sites. These tests shake out basic usability prior to release to the many-site, many-platform, many-VO integration test bed (ITB). In July, the deliverable of a well-tested OSG 1.2 suitable for LHC running was met through the combined efforts of both OSG core staff and the wider community of OSG site administrators and VO testers participating in the validation. The face-to-face site administrator’s workshop hosted by the OSG GOC in Indianapolis in July featured deployment of OSG 1.2 as its main theme.

The VTB and ITB test beds also serve as a platform for testing the main configuration tools of the OSG software stack, which are developed as part of this activity. The configuration system has grown to meet the requirements of the services offered in the OSG software stack including configuration of storage element software.

A new tool suite developed in the Software Tools Group for RSV (resource service validation) configuration and operation testing was vetted on the VTB repeatedly, with feedback given to the development team from the site administrator’s viewpoint.

The persistent ITB continues to provide an on-going operational environment for VO testing at will, as well as being the main platform during the ITB testing prior to a major OSG release. Overall the ITB is comprised of 12 sites providing compute elements and four sites providing storage elements (dCache and BeStMan packages implementing SRM v1.1 and v2.2 protocols); 36 validation processes were defined across these compute and storage resources in readiness for the production release. Pre-deployment validation of applications from 12 VOs were coordinated with the OSG Users group. Other accomplishments include both dCache and SRM-BeStMan storage element testing on the ITB; delivery of new releases of the configuration tool as discussed above; and testing of an Xrootd distributed storage system as delivered by the OSG Storage group.

The OSG Release Documentation continues to receive significant edits from the community of OSG participants. The collection of wiki-based documents capture processes for install, configure, and validation methods as used throughout the integration and deployment processes. These documents were updated and received review input from all corners of the OSG community.

In the past year we have taken a significant step towards increasing contact with the site administration community directly through use of a persistent chat room (“Campfire”). We offer three hour sessions at least three days a week where OSG core Integration or Sites support staff are available to discuss issues, troubleshoot problems or simply “chat” regarding OSG specific issues. The sessions are archived and searchable.

Finally a major new initiative meant to improve the effectiveness of OSG release validation has begun whereby a suite of test jobs can be executed through the (pilot-based) Panda workflow system. The test jobs can be of any type and flavor; the current set includes simple ‘hello-world’ jobs, jobs that are CPU-intensive, and jobs that exercise access to/from the associated storage element of the CE. Importantly, ITB site administrators are provided a command line tool they can use to inject jobs aimed for their site into the system, and then monitor the results using the full monitoring framework (pilot and Condor-G logs, job metadata, etc) for debugging and validation at the job-level. As time goes on additional workloads can be created an executed by the system, simulating components of VO workloads.