CernVM - a virtual appliance for LHC applications
P. Bunčić, Carlos Aguado Sanchez, Jakob Bloomer, Leandro Franco, Steffen Klemer, Pere Mato · 2009
CernVM[1] is a Virtual Software Appliance capable of running physics applications from the LHC experiments at CERN.Such a virtual appliance aims to provide a complete and portable environment for developing and running LHC data analysis on any end-user computer (laptop, desktop) and on the Grid, independently of Operating System software and hardware platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS).The goal is to remove a need for the installation of the experiment software and to minimize the number of platforms (compiler-OS combinations) on which experiment software needs to be supported and tested, thus reducing the cost of software maintenance.The experiment software is delivered to the appliance just in time by means of a network file system (CVMFS) specifically designed for efficient software distribution and installation.The experiment application software and its dependencies are built independently from CernVM Virtual Machine.The procedures for building, installing and validating software release remains in the hands and under the responsibility of each user community.We provide the tools to synchronize pre-built and configured experiment software releases with our central distribution point.In this paper we present current state of CernVM project and plans for further developments.