EGEE site deployment & management using the rocks toolkit

Abstract

Several cluster management toolkits have been successfully applied to high performance clusters. However, Grid service deployment, in particular for EGEE sites, still lacks complete solutions for the distribution, installation and configuration of middleware to build managed Grid infrastructures. This paper focuses on an easy to use framework that manages the installation of all EGEE components with minimal resources, which resulted from the gLite middleware installation and configuration at Universidade do Minho. The objective is to automate the deployment of the EGEE Grid middleware to offer a common operating environment to the geographically dispersed European Civil Protection (CP) community. We developed the EGEE Roll, based on the Rocks toolkit, to provide a standardized software stack across all the sites of a CP - Virtual organization, tackling two of the most time-consuming portions of a site installation - the architecture and the mechanisms. The framework enables site administrators to incrementally and programmatically create and modify the graph description for all the appliances (node) types required by the EGEE model such as CE/SE/UI/WNs. Extending the Rocks approach to configure EGEE proved to be pertinent in the context of the development of infrastructures and services for virtual organizations, including software update and user management. It guarantees the interoperability across sites and full customization at any CP site administrative domain to explore the capabilities of the Grid in CP applications and to reduce the overall time required for the deployment of an EGEE site.