Applications:

R-GMA INCLUDED IN LATEST LCG RELEASE

LCG recently announced a new release of their Grid Software, LCG-2_2_0, which now includes the R-GMA (Relational Grid Monitoring Architecture) middleware. R-GMA is important for a number of experiments that will use it for monitoring their jobs and for the new LCG accounting infrastructure.

R-GMA was developed by a team in the United Kingdom funded by GridPP and the European Data Grid as a relational implementation of the GMA from GGF. It is now being taken forward by the same team into a new EU project, EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) where it is being re-engineered to conform to WS-I Web Service standards. More details are available at hepunx.rl.ac.uk/egee/jra1-uk/.

R-GMA is designed to give a uniform approach to an information system, to logging and to monitoring. It follows a simple producer/consumer model where information is published via a producer and queried by a consumer. In addition, intermediate components acting both as consumers and producers of data can collect and republish information. The system benefits from the power and simplicity of the relational model and does not require that the consumers of information know where the producers are.

Steve Fisher, who leads the R-GMA team at Rutherford Appleton Lab said, "This is a real milestone for us. We've been developing R-GMA for the last three years, and it's great to see it incorporated into LCG, helping the Grid run more smoothly. We think R-GMA will be of real benefit to Grid users."