VO France-Asia deployment and usage

It is deployed at CC, KEK and KISTI. At Kisti, a new PhD student has deployed the Dirac service. The Dirac server is in Hanoï. This initiated a collaboration also with Vietnam.
André Tilquin, affiliated to CPPM and THCA (Tsinghua Center for Astrophysics, http://www.thca.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/index.php/Main_Page), has some computing needs that seem well suited for the intended use-cases of the France-Asia VO. He has already experience running his tasks on the grid under the umbrella of the ESR (Earth Science Research) VO, so his software is grid-ready. Fabio met him in Beijing and suggested him to join the France-Asia VO in order to perform feasibility tests. His jobs are CPU-bound and he needs to regularly submit campaigns of several hundreds of them. Fabio addressed André to Yonny who agreed to take care of setting things up and assisting André performing the foreseen tests.

A question was raised on the plans of IHEP to join the VO. Yonny explains that this needs small set of machines and little storage to begin with. For example, there are actually about 3000 cores on the VO of which 80% are from CC, the rest from KEK and KISTI.

VO Web Site

The VO web site is not yet ready. Yonny will work with webmaster at CC to set it up.

VO Tests

 

As shown in the attached slides, a suspiciously low performance has been observed when transferring files from IHEP to CC-IN2P3. Memory-to-memory network tests based on iperf showed that there is currently a severe limitation: the observed throughput is less than 1 MB/sec which is considered very low taking into account that the link from China to Europe is 2 x 1 Gbps.
 
The cause of this problem is not yet understood but could be related to the problem highlighted in the previous discussion.
 
Once this issue is solved, the file transfer throughput tests will be resumed in order to identify the ability of iRods to exploit the available bandwidth. In the particular case of TREND, there are too many small files which does not help to reach good throughput in long distance transfers.  There was a suggestion to use tarred large file as this is possible with IROD's and to move to UDP protocol for transfers.
 
Regarding the usage of France-Asia VO by TREND, Fabio intends to perform some initial tests of job submission and data access to the iRods repository at CC-IN2P3 in January 2012.
 
Actions:

-Build the VO site.
-Check for IHEP the possibility to join the VO with some resources.
-check the source of low transfers: disentangle between network and Irod's effects.
- Send test jobs to access the data.
-Setup the new user (André Tilquin) to run on the VO