Quattor: Tools and Techniques for the Configuration, Installation and Management of Large-Scale Grid Computing Fabrics

This paper describes the quattor tool suite, a new system for the installation, configuration, and management of operating systems and application software for computing fabrics. At present Unix derivatives such as Linux and Solaris are supported. Quattor is a powerful, portable and modular open source solution that has been shown to scale to thousands of computing nodes and offers a significant reduction in management costs for large computing fabrics. The quattor tool suite includes innovations compared to existing solutions which make it very useful for computing fabrics integrated into grid environments. Evaluations of the tool suite in current large scale computing environments are presented

Autonomic Management of Large Clusters and Their Integration into the Grid

We present a framework for the co-ordinated, autonomic management of multiple clusters in a compute center and their integration into a Grid environment. Site autonomy and the automation of administrative tasks are prime aspects in this framework. The system behavior is continuously monitored in a steering cycle and appropriate actions are taken to resolve any problems. All presented components have been implemented in the course of the EU project DataGrid: The Lemon monitoring components, the FT fault-tolerance mechanism, the quattor system for software installation and configuration, the RMS job and resource management system, and the Gridification scheme that integrates clusters into the Grid

Presentation securite informatique

Vous savez que la sécurité informatique du CERN subit des attaques tous les jours? Ou que, seulement en 2006, plus de 150 ordinateurs ont du être réinstallés suite à une attaque informatique? Ces attaques coutent cher, car la réparation et la remise à niveau peut prendre des jours, avec le risque qu’une partie du travail et des données soient perdus, notamment s’ils avaient été sauvegardé sur un disque local sans copie de sauvegarde. La plupart des incidents au CERN sont dus à un manque de connaissance des dangers liés à la sécurité informatique parmi les utilisateurs. Pour cette raison Lionel Cons du département IT, qui est engagé en première ligne sur le front de la sécurité informatique au CERN, a proposé d'exposer aux membres du département FI les dangers associés à: - l'utilisation de logiciels et outils informatiques non autorisés ; - les nombreux trucs et tours dont vous pourriez être victimes ; - les adresses internet et "pop-up" dont il vaut mieux se méfier; - etc. M. Cons sera la pour vous donner des conseils et faire des suggestions pour prévenir ces dangers. la présentation est ouverte à tout le personnel travaillant dans le département FI

Cybersecurity Update

An update on recent security issues and vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. This talk is based on contributions and input from a range of colleagues both within and outside CERN. It covers clients, servers and control systems

The WLCG Messaging Service and its Future

Enterprise messaging is seen as an attractive mechanism to simplify and extend several portions of the Grid middleware, from low level monitoring to experiments dashboards. The production messaging service currently used by WLCG includes four tightly coupled brokers operated by EGI (running Apache ActiveMQ and designed to host the Grid operational tools such as SAM) as well as two dedicated services for ATLAS-DDM and experiments dashboards (currently also running Apache ActiveMQ). In the future, this service is expected to grow in numbers of applications supported, brokers and technologies. The WLCG Messaging Roadmap identified three areas with room for improvement (security, scalability and availability/reliability) as well as ten practical recommendations to address them. This paper describes a messaging service architecture that is in line with these recommendations as well as a software architecture based on reusable components that ease interactions with the messaging service. These two architectures will support the growth of the WLCG messaging service

Notifications workflows using the CERN IT central messaging infrastructure

In the CERN IT agile infrastructure (AI), Puppet, the CERN IT central messaging infrastructure (MI) and the Roger application are the key constituents handling the configuration of the machines of the computer centre. The machine configuration at any given moment depends on its declared state in Roger and Puppet ensures the actual implementation of the desired configuration by running the Puppet agent on the machine at regular intervals, typically every 90 minutes. Sometimes it is preferable that the configuration change is propagated immediately to the targeted machine, ahead of the next scheduled Puppet agent run on this machine. The particular need of handling notifications in a highly scalable manner for a large scale infrastructure has been satisfied with the implementation of the CERNMegabus architecture, based on the ActiveMQ messaging system. The design and implementation of the CERNMegabus architecture are introduced, followed by the implementation of the Roger notification workflow. The choice of ActiveMQ is analysed and the message flow between the Roger notification producer and the CASTOR, EOS, BATCH and Load Balancing consumers are presented. The employment of predefined consumer modules in order to speed up the on-boarding of new CERNMegabus use cases is also described

Quattor - a framework for managing grid-enabled large scale computing fabrics, December 2004. http://quattor.web.cern.ch/quattor/- documentation.htm. [16

Quattor is a framework for managing large scale computing fabrics. It is a result of developments of the Fabric Management Work Package of the European DataGrid project. Although fabric management components are not grid components themselves, they are essential to have a working grid. Our experience gathering requirements, developing and deploying the Quattor framework in the DataGrid testbed and the CERN Computing Centre shows that there is a real need to be able to install, configure and manage grid computing clusters correctly, automatically and supporting adaptability. The framework provides automated and scalable configuration and installation of very large heterogeneous computing fabrics. It has a modular architecture with a central configuration database and autonomous agents running on fabric nodes. Configuration information is expressed in a high level description language called Pan. At present Unix derivatives such as Linux and Solaris are supported. Quattor has been shown to scale to thousands of computing nodes and offers a significant reduction in management costs for large computing fabrics. Quattor includes innovations compared to existing solutions which make it very useful for computing fabrics integrated into grid environments. Since more than one year, the framework is used to manage 2500 nodes of production farms at the CERN Computer Center. It is adopted by other projects such LHC Computing Grid and institutes across Europe such as IN2P3/LAL, NIKHEF, RAL and UAM.

Towards automation of computing fabrics using tools from the fabric management workpackage of the EU DataGrid project

This article describes the architecture behind the designed fabric management system and the status of the different developments. It also covers the experience with an existing tool for automated configuration and installation that have been adapted and used from the beginning to manage the EU DataGrid testbed, which is now used for LHC data challenge