Minutes, Cross-TA 20240529

- M. Hoeft / Prateek will present the simulation use case next time

- Harry report on the multicloud (NFDI) meeting yesterday, where he reported on the SDP approach. We are still lacking a glossy Portal to present as de.NBI has, but we are getting there. PUNCH about to make a substantial contribution to the multicloud, and we need to explain the difficulties. Harry points out the WLCG, as an example, has been around and developed for N*10 years - this is the timescale it takes to establish good-looking  (and smoothly working) results. 

- Christoph adds that the most difficult part in the multicloud environment is including the data and common access to them from federated resources. This is in the focus of PUNCH and not easy to achieve.

- The ErUM-Data AF workshop in Muenchen 18-20 June is briefly discussed, asp the PUNCH participation: https://indico.desy.de/event/44722/ 

- Elena reports that they have finalized a new Docker image which integrates the Jupyter Lab & VSC environment with a Desktop machine and the libraries necessary for creating the token needed to access C4P and S4P (gfal and oidc-agent client). We are working now on adding other useful (e.g. ML) libraries on top of this, and on creating a basic REANA workflow which will be needed by user to create this access tokens. In parallel, we are testing an alternative (hopefully simpler) procedure based on Benoit’s executable to create the token.

Harry comments that here it shows that it is hard to build a convenient environment for normal users. There are still a number of work-arounds required that make it complicated. 

- Victoria would like to use REANA for one use case - has been discussed since SciTrace workshop last year. Later in June a simple CORSICA example with Jupyter will be finished, and then REANA will be taken up. 

- Christoph says that a new small team from TA5 (Gautam Dange? / FIAS) wants to make use of federated infrastructures - Christoph will invite him to the meeting.    

- Elena adds that established use cases could be included via their documentation sent to Elena. 

- Joe hoped to pursue POSIX solution at LRZ - have not been involved in since last fall; no response from Stephan Hachinger?    This could be taken on by Daniel @ LMU? Question to Manuel / Benoit: Where do things stand, and are you ready to take up a non-expert to try to make use of this and establish this for a typical astro need? Manuel says that integrating the LRZ resources would be useful, and there should no problem to include Daniel. Manuel suggests to have a meeting with Stephan, Daniel etc. on this. Manuel already has an account at LRZ and one could then start to integrate LRZ. 

- Frank reports on FZJ efforts towards cross-TA projects, e.g. the destiny data base containing simulation data that can also be visualised via a web page. One might consider adding C4P / S4P resources to the web page so that users could in real-time use the web page code and produce simulations. Harry asks what kind of data are there, and Frank shows the example page with HDF5 files. Harry and Frank briefly discuss the inclusion of the destiny page on results.punch. Harry and Frank will follow up offline. 

- Achim will have an internship student starting soon - will use this to focus on the H—>4l demonstrator project, with support from a Bonn student.    

- Prateek reports on TLS projects - e.g. post processing of simulated data on REANA etc. and putting all results back to S4P. One use case already tested, will be shown at the next meeting. In parallel working on LOFAR data reduction - good news is that in the local REANA platform they are able to do the data reduction with a large number of files. This might be another use case. Furthermore, we are trying to implement the simulation task on REANA, but this requires more resources (many cores etc.). Preparing containers for smaller-scale simulation task. Harry adds that more resources could be added, but there are limitations. Needs to be passed on to one of he C4P providers? 

- Victoria reports on an outreach event at KIT that went very well and where she talked about PUNCH and the SDP. Slides are sent to TA7 colleagues. Using C4P resources for outreach might be a promising idea.