# Presentation: 510669

## Atlas CAP Closeout

- Thanks to all the presenters for excellent and frank presentations

## Project Overall

- U.S. Atlas (and International Atlas) have made considerable progress in the past 12 months
- Budgets remain very tight, and may jeopardize project goals, especially in the out years

## Management (1)

- Overall, the management of the Software & Computing of the research program appears healthy...
- For FY2006-FY2007, an adequate management reserve is being maintained.  For FY2008, it is ephemeral, in that the computing project deficits consume the full reserve (i.e. there is no reserve). Moreover, the Tier 1 plans do not include the expected increase in overhead by 30%, which pushes the overhead well above the reserve.
- 	Recommendation: Make presentation of what is “unfunded” explicit.
- Minor point: Use of Access and Project does not yet (apparently) include resource loading. These details are being held at lower levels of project (software, tier1, etc.).

## Management (2)

- (Formal) Change Control remains for the most part unimplemented, and is not being used as a management tool.
- The one change which exercised the mechanism this year was an aggregate “omnibus” change, which is not a recommended approach
- The move to PanDA should have invoked change control under any reasonable definitions of triggers
- The re-organization of the WBS should likewise have invoked change control, even if cost neutral
- A 3 month milestone delay as a trigger is much too lax at this stage of the project
- “Changes in scope / cost” as a trigger is too vague; recommend adding an FTE-month or $$$ qualification
- 	Recommendation: Utilize Change Control more formally.

## Software (1)

- Data analysis model has matured to the level of having a concrete definition of the AOD  (additional work needed is recognized)
- Further effort on optimizing read performance of the AOD & ESD would be well spent now
- While the transient/persistent model shows good initial gains, should study whether simplifying the persistent data structures will in the end result in higher performance
- Geometry effort impressive, facilitating a nice event display

## Software (2)

- Responded well to problems in DC2 and future scaling challenges by developing a tool (PanDA) that minimized reliance on the weak links in the grid toolset.  Change made at good point: early enough to do good job in hardening, not so early as to miss opportunity for maturing middleware.
- Presentations need polish: PanDA might be viewed as an adhoc, non-collaborative effort.  Need to emphasize that
- at top end, interfaces to standard executor
- at the bottom end, interfaces to standard grid

## Software (3)

- Commissioning strategy...
- Component level testing for CSC is good
- 	Are the dates for milestones for components firm? Confirm they are early enough for integration testing.
- Delaying a full scale data challenge to actual beam may represent a risk

## Software (3)

- Analysis Model needs additional work to show how pieces all connect together
- will the AOD be used, and give good performance?
- role of tag database (vs trigger data) isn’t clear enough, relationship to streaming

## Software Support

- Plans for software support are considerably more concrete (good!)
- How the 3 centers will be realized & staffed remains vague
- Recommendation: Identify people, charge them with the task, and get them to organize their support activities to accomplish the goals:
- develop process that will motivate support, and not overload those tasked with it
- define / negotiate level of effort

## Facilities

- Substantial progress on procurements and facility services (e.g. dCache, grid interfaces) and ramp-up of staff
- Wonderful news on WAN upgrades
- Capacity and staff are on schedule
- FY2006 will be another significant year of increases

## Facilities (2)

- While current scale of dCache is impressive, current utilization is modest and does not yet represent a significant test
- Size of resources utilized through the grid interface averaged ~100 cpu’s, which is rather modest; need to work on larger stress tests

## Facilities (3)

- BNL is enjoying significant benefit from co-location with RCF
- Need to document benefits, both to show the benefit to agencies, and to reveal potential risk if RCF goes away
- Budget does not include upcoming 30% increase in overhead.
- 	Recommendation: include the overhead in out-year planning.

## Facilities (4)

- Long term planning for Tier 1 (space, etc.) needs additional attention
- Current ESD size and simulation times are considerably above “nominal”, and may result in need for additional storage and compute resources, or a de-scoping of event rate.
- 	Recommendation: Make sure this issue is being addressed at all levels within International Atlas

## Facilities (5)

- Procurement of 2008 resources with fy2008 funds implies that resources are not fully available January 1.
- 	Recommendation:
- Plans should be made to reflect the realities of procuring and commissioning multiple petabytes of disk and ~1000 nodes (plan for staged roll-out during Jan-April 2008)

## Grids

- Formal involvement in OSG management is on a good track
- expressions of support from US Atlas management, involvement of Torre
- There is some unease on both sides (OSG, US Atlas) about Atlas participation in OSG
- 	Recommendation: Find success oriented approach (find a win-win) for US Atlas participation in OSG. OSG needs to deliver a net positive impact on the US LHC experiments early in LHC operations