Abstract
One of the most important steps of software lifecycle is Quality Assurance: this process comprehends both automatic tests and manual reviews, and all of them must pass successfully before the software is approved for production. Some tests, such as source code static analysis, are executed on a single dedicated service: in High Energy Physics, a full simulation and reconstruction chain on a distributed computing environment, backed with a sample “golden” dataset, is also necessary for the quality sign off. The ALICE experiment uses dedicated and virtualized computing infrastructures for the Release Validation in order not to taint the production environment (i.e. CVMFS and the Grid) with non-validated software and validation jobs: the ALICE Release Validation cluster is a disposable virtual cluster appliance based on CernVM and the Virtual Analysis Facility, capable of deploying on demand, and with a single command, a dedicated virtual HTCondor cluster with an automatically scalable number of virtual workers on any cloud supporting the standard EC2 interface. Input and output data are externally stored on EOS, and a dedicated CVMFS service is used to provide the software to be validated. We will show how the Release Validation Cluster deployment and disposal are completely transparent for the Release Manager, who simply triggers the validation from the ALICE build system's web interface. CernVM 3, based entirely on CVMFS, permits to boot any snapshot of the operating system in time: we will show how this allows us to certify each ALICE software release for an exact CernVM snapshot, addressing the problem of Long Term Data Preservation by ensuring a consistent environment for software execution and data reprocessing in the future.
Highlights
The validation procedure is made of several independent batch jobs, whose results are subsequently merged
We cannot afford the validation procedure to run into site-specific problems, such as misconfigurations or, in general, non-controlled worker node deployments: any of such problems potentially yields false negatives making it more difficult to detect software regressions
ALICE uses CernVM-FS [2] as software deployment technology: any new published release candidate would make the central repository catalog tainted with dozens of rejected
Summary
This content has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text. Ser. 664 022006 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/664/2/022006) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more. Download details: IP Address: 188.184.3.52 This content was downloaded on 06/01/2016 at 16:06 Please note that terms and conditions apply. 21st International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2015) IOP Publishing. Journal of Physics: Conference Series 664 (2015) 022006 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/664/2/022006
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