GOCDB, a topology repository for a worldwide grid infrastructure

All grid projects have to deal with topology and operational information like resource distribution, contact lists and downtime declarations. Storing, maintaining and publishing this information properly is one of the key elements to successful grid operations. The solution adopted by EGEE and WLCG projects is a central repository that hosts this information and makes it available to users and client tools. This repository, known as GOCDB, is used through EGEE and WLCG as an authoritative primary source of information for operations, monitoring, accounting and reporting. After giving a short history of GOCDB, the paper describes the current architecture of the tool and gives an overview of its well established development workflows and release procedures. It also presents different collaboration use cases with other EGEE operations tools and deals with the High Availability mechanism put in place to address failover and replication issues. It describes ongoing work on providing web services interfaces and gives examples of integration with other grid projects, such as the NGS in the UK. The paper finally presents our vision of GOCDB's future and associated plans to base its architecture on a pseudo object database model, allowing for its distribution across the 11 EGEE regions. This will be one of the most challenging works to achieve during the third phase of EGEE in order to prepare for a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure.