HEP Applications Evaluation of the EDG Testbed and Middleware

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the European DataGrid (EDG) testbed and middleware, focusing on its functionality, performance, and integration with LHC experiments, highlighting challenges and future development directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of EDG middleware and testbed performance, including practical experiences from major experiments and insights into future software developments.

Findings

Successful job submission and data management testing

Identification of scaling and portability issues

Insights into remote debugging and system monitoring

Abstract

Workpackage 8 of the European Datagrid project was formed in January 2001 with representatives from the four LHC experiments, and with experiment independent people from five of the six main EDG partners. In September 2002 WP8 was strengthened by the addition of effort from BaBar and D0. The original mandate of WP8 was, following the definition of short- and long-term requirements, to port experiment software to the EDG middleware and testbed environment. A major additional activity has been testing the basic functionality and performance of this environment. This paper reviews experiences and evaluations in the areas of job submission, data management, mass storage handling, information systems and monitoring. It also comments on the problems of remote debugging, the portability of code, and scaling problems with increasing numbers of jobs, sites and nodes. Reference is made to the pioneeering work of Atlas and CMS in integrating the use of the EDG Testbed into their data challenges. A forward look is made to essential software developments within EDG and to the necessary cooperation between EDG and LCG for the LCG prototype due in mid 2003.