[glue-wg] publishing srb information on glue

[Jensen, J (Jens)]

Shunde Zhang wrote:
 > Hi all,
 >
 > I am new to glue schema. May I ask if I can publish SRB information
 > with GLUE
 > schema? Since the examples I saw are all gridftp. thanks a lot.
 >
 > Cheers,
 > Shunde.

Hi Shunde.

For my 0.02, the answer is yes, sort of. I have actually looked into 
this very problem, although I haven't spent much time on it yet.  I am 
not an SRB expert myself though, but I am working with people who are.

The trick is, unsurprisingly, to pretend that SRB is a StorageElement, 
and I aim to come up with a recipe for doing that - provided we can make 
it work with GridPP/EGEE resources - if we can't, why bother?  The main 
difficulty that I can think of is that many users have personal 
directories (er, collections) in SRB and it is not straightforward to 
make automated tools pick up the path from GLUE unless an SA is 
published for each person or something weird like that.

So the real question is what you aim to achieve with it.  SRB has its 
own control and data transfer protocols.  To achieve interoperability 
you need a standard protocol like the gridftp interface developed by 
Argonne (I believe) which you can then publish as a data transfer protocol.

The SRB world itself does not use GLUE - at least none of the SRB 
communities I know and work with.  The UK National Grid Service for 
example has SRB resources and uses GLUE, but the GLUE is not used to 
publish the SRBs, they are set up independently via user's MdasEnv files.

Hope this helps a bit.  If you want to collaborate or do something 
specific feel free to contact me.

Regards,
			--jens

-- 
Dr Jens Jensen
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Science and Technology Facilities Council
UK