In planning

In the (particle) physics community there are currently three significant projects which deal with data storage, location and retrieval on the Grid: the Storage Resource Manager (SRM) , the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the European Data Grid Storage Element (EDG SE) . These have been developed separately and adopted by different groups: eg. BaBar and the CERN CMS experiment use SRB, bioinformatics use SRB and LHCb uses SE. There is now a need to ensure their interoperability to allow sites to standardise on one solution while supporting multiple experiments and user communities.

Edinburgh and Glasgow PPE have significant interests in interoperability between these technologies as they will be one of the main groups involved with storage and data management issues under GridPP2. Also, as CMS has mandated the use of SRM in the future, we are keen to ensure the UK's investment in SRB systems is not wasted. The purpose of this project is to provide an interface to abstract the storage solution from the Grid.

The initial aim will be to develop an SRM interface to SRB. If time and resources permit, a second aim would be to develop an SRB-to-SRM interface.