Configuration management and monitoring of the middleware at GridKa

Abstract

GridKa is a computing centre located in Karlsruhe. It serves as Tier-1 centre for the four LHC experiments and also provides its computing and storage resources for other non-LHC HEP and astroparticle physics experiments as well as for several communities of the German Grid Initiative D-Grid. The middleware layer at GridKa comprises three main flavours: Globus, gLite and UNICORE. This layer provides the access to the several clusters, according to the requirements of the corresponding communities. The heterogeneous structure of middleware resources and services requires their effective administration for stable and sustainable operation of the whole computing centre. In the presentation the overview of the middleware system at GridKa is given with focus on the configuration management and monitoring. These are the crucial components of the administration task for the system with high-availability setup. The various configuration tools used at GridKa, their benefits and limitations as well as developed automation procedures of the configuration management will be discussed. The overview of the monitoring system which evaluates the information delivered by central and local grid information services and provides status and detailed diagnostics for the middleware services is presented.