CREAM Computing Element: a status update

The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) project aims to deliver a consolidated set of middleware products based on the four major middleware providers in Europe -ARC, dCache, gLite and UNICORE. The CREAM (Computing Resource Execution And Management) Service, a service for job management operation at the Computing Element (CE) level, is a software product which is part of the EMI middleware distribution. In this paper we discuss about some new functionality in the CREAM CE introduced with the first EMI major release (EMI-1, codename Kebnekaise). The integration with the Argus authorization service is one of these implementations: the use of a unique authorization system, besides simplifying the overall management, allows also to avoid inconsistent authorization decisions. An improved support for complex deployment scenarios (e.g. for sites having multiple CE head nodes and/or having heterogeneous resources) is another new achievement. The improved support for resource allocation in a multi-core environment, and the initial support of version 2.0 of the Glue specification for resource publication are other new functionalities introduced with the first EMI release.