Present: Charles Loomis (CNRS), Project Coordinator Ruben Montero (UCM), Technical Coordinator Ignacio Llorente (UCM) Vangelis Floros (GRNET) Marc-Elian Begin (SixSq) Jose Lopez (TID) David O'Callaghan (TCD) Agenda page in indico: http://indico.lal.in2p3.fr/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1440 I. Modifications of the Agenda Discussion of the planning for the EU Review and discussions of other workshops in addition to the Cloud Workshop were added to the agenda. II. Current Status of Project C. Loomis presented the current state of the project. The presentation is available from the indico agenda page. The highlights have been included in each section below and marked with [CL]. Overall Progress: For management there are no real concerns although Q4 will be hectic. Dissemination has made StratusLab very visible in EU scientific community. Development going along well with all major features available except for storage and service manager. Tools and support working well. Use and feedback from scientific communities and system administrators is increasing. Interest from many sites in deploying it. Reference infrastructure is running well, with the grid site over cloud services certified. III. Approval of Deliverables/Milestones The following documents have been produced since the last PMB meeting: D5.2, MS2, MS7 and QR2. DECISION: All of these documents were approved by the PMB. [CL] Three milestones are due for M9: MS3 (bioinformatics virtual appliance), MS10 (initial virtual appliance repository), and MS14 (release of cloud-like management of grid services). First two are achieved and just need to be documented. Last one is scheduled for Sprint 10. J. Lopez is aware of the situation with the service manager (Claudia). TID has had many obligations in the last few months, but now will be able to more fully contribute and to catch up with the schedule. [CL] Upcoming deliverables/milestones: There are 11 documents to be delivered in M12. Because of the review, all of these need to be delivered to the EC by 10 June 2010. See discussion below about the EU review for plans to advance the work on some of these deliverables to avoid a rush at the end of the year. IV. Memoranda of Understanding [CL] Memoranda of Understanding: Many projects have approached us about having MoUs with StratusLab. These include EGI, EMI, ERINA+, and EDGI. The general result of the discussion was that all of these (plus IGE) are interesting to persue. However we must be practical and ensure that there is a real interest in formalizing these collaborations and ensure that they do not become a distraction to our own work program. Specific comments and possible collaboration topics are included below. EGI: Essential to have some agreement with EGI. One possible topic is around the workshops that have already been proposed. Need to understand better if StratusLab should become a software supplier (with SLA). Another open question is how to relate to our users and administrators: use EGI as the conduit or direct contact. If EGI is used as the conduit, then there needs to be some consolidation of requests on their part. The communication channels need to be clearly defined on both sides. Using the GGUS system may also be a collaboration point with us becoming a "support unit". If we do supply software to them, then an honest effort on their part to deploy the software and evaluate it must be done. Questions about them taking over the responsibility of generating grid service images. IGE: Ignacio brought up IGE in context of producing grid service images. There is a task to this effect in the project; he'll check to see what can be done here. ACTION(I. Llorente): Check with IGE on image generation task and see if this would be the basis of collaboration. EMI: We use code from them for the grid certificate and VOMS proxy support. There are changes here that would be useful for us. Similarly, there are changes in YAIM and local schedulers that would be helpful. There is an existing collaboration through Julich; formalizing it with an MoU may be helpful. EDGI: There is already some collaboration going on at LAL and in addition at least one developer from EDGI has access to the reference infrastructure. Preparation of images and ensuring compatability with desktop systems is probably the scope of this collaboration. May benefit us to formalize this. ERINA+: This will probably help us in preparing our deliverables concerning our impact and sustainability. However, the proposed MoU is very one-sided. Need to ensure that timescales fit in with our project and determin what level of effort is required from us. Also need to determine exactly what they will be providing us. Need also to ensure that prior approval is required before publicising any financial information. Others: David mentioned that they are involved in Mantychore essentially working on advanced networing services on demand. There may be some scope for them collaborating with us. V. Workshops [CL] Cloud Workshop: EGI has suggested to have a joint workshop to discuss how virtualization and cloud technologies can be integrated with the grid infrastructure. Shortly before the meeting we also received invitations from EDGI about preparing a joint summer school (probably in Budapest) and an email from EGI about their EGI Technical Forum in Lyon (which will be centered on integration of virtualization and cloud technologies). The general feeling is that all of these are worthwhile investments of our time. The problem will be to come up with champions for each one to coordinate our participation. The most urgent are the Cloud workshop and Summer School. Possibly Kathryn could be our representative with Meb as her shadow for the Cloud Workshop. Christophe may be a good candidate for the EGI Technical Forum as that will be held in Lyon. VI. Partner Contributions and Effort Utilization [CL] All partners are underspending in terms of effort. Partners need to be aware of this and ensure that 1) they will use the allocated money or 2) transfer unused funds to other partners. In going around all of the partners, each is aware of the situation and all have plans to fully use the allocated effort. This will be more carefully reviewed in M12 with the Forms C to see if adjustments need to be made. VII. Review of Y1 Work Plan and Objectives [CL] At the technical level several changes have been made to the work plan: 1) user visible cloud & cloud API moved from Y2 to Y1, 2) hybrid cloud investigations moved from Y1 to Y2, and 3) appliance repository changed to Marketplace and storage. Otherwise work closely follows that foreseen in the technical annex. More fully describing the proposed changes to the work plan: 1) The tasks regarding having a public (user-visible) cloud and an associated cloud API have been moved from Y2 to Y1, largely because of interest from scientific communities and resource centers wanting to provide public clouds. 2) The tasks about hybrid clouds will be expanded to include also cloud federation models. This will be moved to Y2 to balance the change above. Also having a solid release will make these investigations easier. 3) As foreseen in the TA, the appliance repository consists of a single service that contains appliance metadata, appliance storage, and services for changing appliance formats. This has been split into different services. The Marketplace will handle appliance metadata. Storage will take place with normal cloud storage or outside of the cloud. Instead of providing a service for appliance format changes, client tools will be provided instead. DECISION: The PMB formally approves the above changes to the work plan. VIII. EU Review Planning [CL] Enric has contacted us about dates for the first EU Review of the project. The preferred dates from our side is sometime in the week of 4 July 2011. Enric will see if this works with our reviewers. We need to begin planning what we will present. The discussion arrived at the following concensus: * Presentations should be organized by work package. * Overall presentation must provide metrics information and financial information. * Core of the demo should be a virtualized grid site. * Should have video of that as standby in case of networking problems. There was a question about who our reviewers will be. Cal will follow up to see when we will know who they are. We also need to plan for a rehearsal to ensure that everything goes well. To ensure that everything is done on time for the review. We discussed advancing some deliverables to make M12 less hectic. The candidates for moving forward are: D4.2, D4.3, D4.4 provide drafts early and only correct at last minute; D3.2 can be filled with current content now and filled out with late information at the end; D2.2 evaluation mechanism can be determined with a skeleton document provided. XI. Post-Project Collaboration/Follow-Ons [CL] General desire to continue with the collaboration. Need to determine how to achieve this (with funding!). All of the partners expressed a general willingness to continue the collaboration, but it was clear that doing this in a meaningful way would require funding. We will look for both European and national funding programs to see if anything would be appropriate. X. AOB V. Floros suggested that we organize another face-to-face meeting. This was agreed by everyone. Cal will start a doodle to find an appropriate time for this meeting. Volunteers to host the meeting would be welcome.