Kick-off meeting for managing the Analysis applications in DEFT, and the Web interface for that process

On June 13th, 2013 there was a meeting at CERN during which we discussed the initial requirements and parameters of the project aimed at supporting the analysis workflows in Prodsys2.

Present: J.Elmsheuser, N.Ozturk, M.Potekhin, A.Stradling

The scope of the items presented and discussed was as follows:

• description of the updated analysis model which involves "slimming" and "skimming"
• requirement for the user interface that would be optimal to support this particular mode of processing
• discussion of whether the database schemas being developed in Prodsys2 in the context of managed production can be extended and reused to cover the use cases presented
• itemization of purely technical issues that already are on our plate and which will need to be resolved very soon
• exploration of security, auth/auth and access policies
• characterization of the data elements present in the analysis stream as being similar to what's used in production, i.e. essentially relying on same dataset infrastructure and nomenclature
• evaluation of Django as a candidate platform for the Web service, based on the experience of the project participants
• usefulness of the XML format adopted for Meta-Task description in DEF
• the urgency of setting up a dedicated machine, to cover the needs of the project at CERN
• general timeline of the project

Consensus was reached and plans were made accordingly, in particular:

• the timeline of this project closely matches what was planned for "vanilla" DEFT commissioning
•  the starting point for development, in terms of the platform, will be Django
• authentication and access policies will be implemented by mapping identities obtained from CERN SSO and the encrypted DN from X509 certificate, to the user table
• the UI will provide ready capabilities for using templates and reusing typical tasks, with providing easy to use templates and settings based on the working group attribution (context-sensitive autoimation)

Separately, it was decided that the software development team will consist of the following personnel:

• M.Potekhin (project lead)
• A.Vaniachine (conceptual design, commissioning and QA)
• D.Golubkov (Web service design and coding)
• A.Stradling (technical design + module development)
• L.Sargsyan (Web service design and coding)
• S.Baranov (System Administrator, tech support and issue tracking, commissioning and QA)

The immediate deliverables were agreed upon:

• a Python module encapsulating the dataset naming logic according to the official nomenclature. To be done by A.Stradling, ETA end of June
• setting up a Web server with all components to support Django and a proper Apache configuration. To be done by S.Baranov and M.Potekhin, ETA June 22nd
• Having a service running to enable port scans etc, M.Potekhin, ETA end of June
• Prototype of a dataset registration service (functionality still not factored out of AKTR), M.Potekhin, ETA mid-July
• Updating DEFT schemas to support the Analysis workflow, D.Golubkov, ETA mid-July

According to the personnel breakdown presented above, the bulk of the Wev development will be done by D.Golubkov and L.Sargsyan.

June 18th update:
Laura and Dmitry started work on the initial task display module for the UI
July 3rd update:
Django prototype ready (with simplified schemas) for Tasks and Meta-Tasks
Dev server running, Apache TBD