Clarens, SRB, and POOL, from Conrad Steenberg, 10/10/2002

Hi Haifeng

Firstly, I'm glad that Clarens is working well for you :-)

Looking at the exchange so far, it seems you are interested in doing
something more closely tied to data management extraction. I agree with
Eric that in the short term getting the OTL data query/extraction layer
working should be the highest priority.

There is one related project that will have to be done regardless by
whom it is done: 
For the CMS experiment there is a data persistency/management layer that
will likely be the method by which Root-based data will be accessed.
This is the POOL (Persistent OO Layer) framework, more info is at
http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/persist/
This framework is based on MySQL, so it should be easy enough to set up.

A second project that is already underway, is to provide a Clarens
interface to SRB (http://www.sdsc.edu/DICE/SRB/index.html). The BaBAR
experiment stores a large amount of data in SRB, and it may also be
useful for storing data and meta-data for end-user physics analysis.

There are also a lot of more Grid-related interfacing that could be done
through Clarens, e.g. Virtual Organazation management, or working with
the SiteAAA group of PPDG to implement finer grained authorization
mechanisms.

There are also more CS-oriented projects that I can think of, including
WAN server/data discovery and search functionality for the Clarens
server.

These should all fit in well within the scope of PPDG.

Cheers

Conrad