Computing Projects

Several Projects catering the needs of different departments at NCP have been completed and a few are in pipeline and near completion. These projects have enhanced the working efficiency of various departments of NCP by automization and eliminating the traditional manual working. Following is the list of projects.

LCG node is deployed and maintained by the advanced scientific computing group at NCP. The effort to deploy a grid node in Pakistan was started in October 2003, with a workshop named “Grid Technology Workshop” held from October 20 – 22, 2003. The first ever test-bed was deployed using LCG_1 tag 1.1.1.2 during the workshop consisting on 9 machines providing the following services:

30 machines were used during the tutorial for enabling users to communicate with the deployed test-bed in Grid Technology Workshop held in NCP.

Now NCP is a Tested & Certified Grid Node in Pakistan. Grid node was tested & certified by the Grid Deployment Team (dteam) at CERN and added to the Grid Operations Centre (GOC) website. Now NCP is a certified WLCG Grid node, first in South Asia and fifth in Asia.  NCP Grid Node remains up-to-date with the newer versions of WLCG.

• NCP deployed a new WLCG version which is LCG_2 tag 2.0.0 in June 2004
• In September 2004, we moved to the newer version of LCG_2 tag 2.2.0
• In January 2005, we installed WLCG tag 2.3.0 In March we updated it to tag 2.3.1
• In April 2005, we upgraded our node to LCG_2 tag 2.4.0
• In November, 2005 we upgraded to the version tag 2.6.0 on our node.
• In March 2006, we installed the version tag 2_7_0
• In October 2006, we moved to latest version tag 3.0.2_1

We also upgraded in hardware resources by adding more machines in September 2008 and now we have 34 CPUs in our node. The details are as follows:

PK-Grid-CA Certification Authority

For becoming a fully operational grid node, one needs to have digital certificates issued by a trusted Certification Authority (CA). NCP deployed the first grid test bed in October 2003 and a need was felt getting user and host certificates. It was decided by the management that it would be beneficial for our grid node if we could issue certificates ourselves and become a trusted CA. The first draft Certificate Policy and Certification Practice Statement (CP-CPS) based on RFC2527, was prepared and sent to the European Grid Policy Management Authority (EU-Grid-PMA). Then the efforts continued and we became accredited by the EU-Grid-PMA in September 2004 in their 2nd meeting in Brussels, Belgium.

In December 2007, we drafted a new CP-CPS based on the structure suggested by RFC3647 and sent it to PMA for approval which was approved in PMA meeting in January 2008. We have been issuing certificates to users and hosts to all grid partners since 2004. In June 2008 we conducted first internal audit of the CA for assessing compliance of CA operations with CP-CPS. The audit report is available on CA website. More details about CA statistics can be obtained from the following URL:

                  http://www.ncp.edu.pk/pk-grid-ca

Two people were involved in development and implementation of this project, namely:

CMS production group at CERN, with the help of its collaborators called 'Regional Centers (RC)', located in various countries all over the world, is responsible for running the production at the request of physicists. RCs act as collaborator for 'Productions Centers (PC)', working with them. The production centers are required to Setup Farms. They collect components of software required for setting up farm from CMS and install them locally. CMS production group is also responsible for coordinating production activities, developing production tools, which helps to keep track of status of assignments running locally or by Regional Centers and keeping track of produced events during different steps in production cycle. The data produced at the RC's is transferred to CERN for archival. CERN/CMS group is also responsible for maintaining these archives.

To boost NCP-CERN collaboration; other production centers in Pakistan including PAEC1, PAEC2, PAEC3, NUST, COMSATS are also participating in the CMS Production. No single center can provide all the resources for the production so a new concept of federation of centers was adapted to pool down all the resources. Technical support is provided by NCP regarding CMS Production software, PU data and other debugging issues on regular basis via emails, telephonic conversations and meetings at NCP. In December 2004, CMS Production phase shifted to WLCG. NCP produced 1M CMKIN and 1M OSCAR events. The details of these events generated in CMKIN and OSCAR were then presented in CERN in the two of the production meetings. Since then the official CMS production shifted to WLCG.

                  http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a043450