Technical coordination group members and invited persons
ZOOM link: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/730780003
28 April 2020, 14:05 - 15:00
Present: David, Maiken, Anders, Mattias, Aleksandr, Balazs, Oxana
== News
Pilot for LDMX is in progress, some things to fix. Some cooling issues at NBI, many servers are down, so the . There's a call in Denmark for developing a "common batch submission system" and dashboard for HPC, ARC seems to be suitable, but the deadline is in 2 days. UMD does not require formal special release notification any more, a regular release announcement is enough.
== Release
Tag is ready but build didn't start yet due to other delays, and we might get a build for Fedora 32 which is out today.
== ARC vs Globus
There's confusion worldwide what in ARC depends on Globus. In reality, dependencies are:
* GridFTP protocol for both job submission and data movement uses GSI, compiled against Globus libraries in EPEL; but both jobs and data can use https instead
** ARGUS integration for GridFTP job submission depends on LCMAPS libraries which in turn depend on Globus libraries, and
** Nagios tests that test GridFTP also depend on Globus, obviously.
Contrary to popular beliefs, Globus is NOT used in:
* For authentication, pure X509 from OpenSSL is used
* VOMS is also implemented via OpenSSL (no Globus, no even VOMS libraries)
* xRSL uses own ARC parsers, only the syntax is "borrowed" from Globus RSL
* ARGUS integration for EMI-ES is native and does not depend on Globus
Conclusion: once GridFTP job submission is dropped (and storage servers do not require GridFTP), ARC is Globus-free. Nothing in ARC pulls Globus dependencies by default once GridFTP is disabled.
== Bugs
Nothing to discuss
== Config file
Since arc.conf.reference has no versions, whenever a new feature appears (or old one gets deprecated) in arc.conf, reference to the respective ARC tag should be made in the text. Web doc is actually autogenerated from arc.cong.reference."CHANGE: new parameter" should be replaced with "CHANGE: INTRODUCED IN 6.0" or such. Some clean-up is needed anyway.