# HEPiX Working Groups

Following discussions held at the CHEP92 (Computers in High Energy Physics) meeting in Annecy and during the two days of the HEPiX meeting in CERN September 28th and 29th, it has been decided to restructure HEPiX along the following lines.

In future, specific groups will be established to target specific areas and named coordinators will be sought for each group. In addition, we will form regional chapters for HEPiX, initially one European and the other North American. Other areas may follow later as interest builds up; in the meantime, interested parties in such areas are welcome to attach themselves to whichever chapter they prefer and will be invited to participate in any activities they wish in either chapter. The volunteer coordinators in these chapters will be jointly responsible for the general organisation of HEPiX and its working groups.

## Common HEP UNIX Environment

It was agreed that it would be useful to study if some form of common working environment could be produced among HEP UNIX sites. This could ease the life of physicists who migrate among the labs and the Universities as well as assist UNIX administrators in providing some guidelines. What constitutes the environment is not fully defined (shell, startup scripts, environment variables, window interface, tools, etc, etc). Whether some useful consensus can actually be achieved is also open to question; we may be too late in defining this, too much history out there; different sites may have vastly different constraints. Nevertheless, an attempt will be made. It was emphasised that whatever results, if any, will not be compulsory and not necessarily the default environment. The idea is simply to produce something that works across multiple platforms and is available if so desired by migratory users and others.

The initial work will be coordinated by Wolfgang Friebel, DESY, E-mail friebel@ifh.de with help from John Gordon, RAL, E-mail jcg@ib.rl.ac.uk and Alan Silverman, CERN, E-mail ALAN@VXCERN.CERN.CH. Evaluations of their results should be performed by different sites, both large and small, and Rochelle Lauer, Yale, E-mail lauer@yalehep.bitnet has already offered help.

## Documentation Collections

The idea of this exercise is to make available to HEPiX members all documentation on the use of UNIX in HEP which might be of interest. Such documentation will NOT be collected in a central site, it being accepted that it would be continually out of date. Instead, a central registry will be built up consisting of pointers. This registry is available worldwide via the use of WWW. The work will be coordinated by Judy Richards, CERN, E-mail JUDY@CERNVM.CERN.CH.

## Tools Database

Similar to the previous group, this will consist of a set of pointers to UNIX- based tools and utilities which are of particular interest to HEP users. Once again, the tools themselves will not be stored centrally, only the pointers. Along with these pointers, the group may try to solicit reviews, hints, critiques, etc. And once again the database will be made available via WWW and FREEHEP. Carrie Kost promised to try to seed the database with a list of tools used at TRIUMF; his E-mail address is kost@erich.triumf.ca. After the meeting, Robert Bruen, MIT, E-mail Bruen@MITLNS.MIT.EDU, offered to try to coordinate this group. MICHAEL OGG of CARLETON University, Ottawa, E-mail ogg@physics.carleton.ca, had already offered during CHEP92 to try to find someone to help.

## NQS Extensions

It had been made clear during CHEP92 that many sites had independently produced enhancements to the basic NQS package. John O'Neall, IN2P3, E-mail jon@frcpn11.in2p3.fr offered to study if some merging could be performed.

This working group conducted a survey of the different flavours of NQS and have presented their results in two documents

- NQS Questionaire results
- Slides of comparison of batch systems