This wiki is obsolete, see the NorduGrid web pages for up to date information.
Roadmap
ARC Roadmap
ARC enables a number of national Grid/e-Science infrastructures, and is one of the solutions used by the European Grid Infrastructure. ARC Roadmap is thus based on the necessity to continuously support such infrastructures, and evolve following user requirements and technology developments.
Implemented features and new functionality from the Roadmap are rolled out with the ARC releases. NorduGrid aims to deliver one major release per year around every spring and a few minor releases per year ( see ARC release categories explained here). This page maintains a high-level component and feature list, including phasing out plans for short and longer term.
Short-term
On the one-year perspective the following tasks serve as main objective for ARC development:
- arc.conf restructuring and major clean-up
- implement consistent server-side logging
- revise the way Virtual Organizations are treated within ARC
- documentation review including necessary updates due to configuration changes
- provide a solution for automatic server-side performance data collection, including the definition of performance metrics
- improve scalability of the data-transfer subsystem
- improve overall ARC performance by various reorganization within the "controldir"
- testing and fine tuning the GLUE2-based information system integration with Top-BDII information tree
- continued roll-out of the WS-based job submission and management interface of A-REX: the EMI-ES channel.
- provide virtual images and containers of various ARC services, provision A-REX as a cloud appliance, enter into the IaaS and PaaS domain.
- provide out-of-the box support integration with pilot job frameworks, the dominant job management platform of LHC community
- short term migration to python-based LRMS for some of the batch systems. Start the work of re-implementation of the LRMS backend layer of A-REX, try to move away from perl
Phase out plans
The support for following components/interfaces/products are planned to be discontinued in the next major release:
- CANL security libraries
Mid/longer-term
On the two or three year perspective we are considering the following development activities:
- Replacement of the EGIIS-based information indexing layer of ARC. A GOCDB-based system may be a candidate.
- Interface simplification: our dream is to arrive at the "one set of golden ARC interface" status.
- New intermediate layer between ARC components and the batch systems
- Containerized Runtime Environments. Complete re-design of the ARC RTE concept.
- Support for Federated Identities, Open up ARC for Federated Identity Management solutions
- Opening up A-REX for better interactive access, interactive analysis is highly requested missing feature
- Comply with the data access protocols and metadata/file catalogue directions of WLCG
- Develop a prototype ARC client on one of the mobile platforms
- Experiment with intelligent auto-parallelization mechanisms built into A-REX
- Consider moving away from LDAP as an information system technology (risky)
Phase out plans (longer term)
- GridFTP jobplugin interface of the CE to be completely replaced by EMI-ES
- glue1.3 and nordugrid schema support to be replaced by glue2
Older planning pages
Dedicated page for the preparation of the next ARC release
