ATLAS PPDG quarterly report Q1'01
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US ATLAS Grid Testbed
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In ATLAS, a primary focus of PPDG efforts in this quarter has been
establishing a US ATLAS grid testbed involving our PPDG sites (ANL,
BNL, LBNL) and several university sites (Boston U, LBNL, Indiana U, U of
Michigan, U of Oklahoma, and U of Texas-Arlington). The effort has been
organized by PPDG collaborator Ed May at ANL. Each site is running a
Globus 1.1.3 gateway and hosting a standard set of grid tools and ATLAS
applications.  This testbed will be used for PPDG tool development and
testing.  This is intended to be a continuously running test and
development vehicle for PPDG, GriPhyN and ATLAS. A status display of
the test grid can be found at
http://heppc1.uta.edu/kaushik/computing/grid-status. 
We run a weekly technical coordination by phone/VRVS conference.

The implementation of the ATLAS US grid testbed at ANL-HEP is
described at http://www.hep.anl.gov/globus.

The Berkeley effort has focused on bring up a testbed node at the
NERSC-PDSF.  We have installed Globus on a gateway machine so that
other ATLAS can submit jobs to the PDSF LSF.  ATLAS members can now
work on PDSF using certificates issued by Argonne and Berkeley as well
as from a number of other top-level domains (NPACI, NCSA, the DOE
Science Grid and NASA).  Working with Ed May at Argonne, we have
resolved the problems associated with installing certificate-signing
policies on ATLAS machines.

The Tier 1 site at BNL deployed a dedicated Linux farm (currently two
nodes, but expandable to meet demand) to serve requests from other US
ATLAS Grid sites via LSF queue.  The Tier 1 disk storage resources are
available for Grid data transfers.  We have been actively working on
enabling Grid access to the Tier 1 HPSS storage and we expect
significant progress during the next quarter.

Early grid connectivity to Europe is vital for the Tier 1 center.
During the quarter, BNL demonstrated the ability to exchange
authentication credentials with our European collaborators.  Globus
requests from Italy were successfully executed at BNL.

Further information on the US ATLAS grid testbed can be found at
http://www.usatlas.bnl.gov/computing/grid/.

Distributed data services testbed
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At ANL, testbeam data is in use to provide a development and test
environment for PPDG distributed data services.  ATLAS Tilecal
testbeam data for 1998 and 1999 stored at NERSC's HPSS service
hpss.nersc.gov was copied (replicated) at the HPSS service at BNL,
hpss.rcf.bnl.gov. Perl scripts were written to gather replication
information data. This information was used to populate a MySQL
database at BNL to provide access to the replication data and
meta-data describing the ATLAS Tilecal testbeam raw data and
Objectivity database files. The schema is shown at
http://gate.hep.anl.gov/globus/replication.html Each raw data
replication is about 1400 files or 150GB in total. We are currently
building a complete Objectivity database at BNL, again about 1400
files or 200GB in total. We will use these data to test the PPDG
replication management and transport services.

Rapid prototyping tool for distributed data services
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At BNL, a rapid prototyping tool 'DBYA' was developed for design
studies and component prototyping for the distributed data service
that is the principal ATLAS year 1 PPDG milestone. A MySQL database is
used for cataloguing, metadata and the management of distributed data
stores. Perl scripts populate the databases and drive the
autogeneration of C++ and Java interface code based on database
schema. Browsing and querying is available via web interface and
command line. The system presently catalogs about 30k files on disk
and in mass store (BNL HPSS and CERN staging system), including the
main simulation data repository for ATLAS, the tile calorimeter test
beam data replicated at BNL, and the ATLAS software repository. It is
presently in use for developing experiment-specific catalog loading
infrastructure, and exploring the organization and schema for metadata
describing both the data and the infrastructure of the distributed
data service. The web interface for the system is at
http://atlassw1.phy.bnl.gov/dbya/dyShowMain.pl and further information
is available at http://atlassw1.phy.bnl.gov/dbya/info