ARC and EGI operations

Note: The information in this page is work in progress. Please also consult the older and not fully up-to-date How to plug an ARC site into EGI page for the moment being.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is operated through a collection of operational services, tools. The ARC deployments that wish to be "part of the EGI" should follow a couple of administrative, configuration and deployment steps. This Wiki area describes how to integrate an ARC deployment (mostly ARC Computing Elements) with the EGI operation framework.

Accounting

Resource Usage information is centrally collected in the EGI accounting database, called the APEL. The EGI accounting infrastructure is a complex system that involves various sensors in different regions, all publishing data to a central repository. The data is processed, summarized and displayed in the accounting portal (http://accounting.egi.eu/egi.php), which acts as a common interface to the different accounting record providers and presents a homogeneous view of the data gathered and a user-friendly access to understanding resource utilization.

ARC CEs should generate accounting records in the proper format and the records should be transferred to the APEL database.

Service Monitoring

EGI uses a NAGIOS-based system, called the SAM, to remotely monitor services. Several ARC-related probes have been developed and used in production to monitor ARC services. The main portal for SAM: https://grid-monitoring.egi.eu/myegi

ARC deployments should successfully pass all the remote Nagios probes.

Service Registration

EGI maintains a central catalogue of deployed services and participating sites and countries. Being part of EGI, i.e. offering services for EGI, requires proper registration records in the Grid Configuration Database (GOCDB). GOCDB (https://goc.egi.eu/) is the central input system for recording Grid topology information. This includes the Sites that contribute to the production Grid infrastructure, their associated Service Endpoints, and their operational status.

Since GOCDB does not provide a full service or site information, in addition to GOCDB another information discovery system is operated to store such data: The TOP/Site BDII network (http://gridinfo.web.cern.ch/).

ARC services should be registered in GOCDB and also should be made visible for the TOP/Site-BDII network.