Nine months in the life of EGEE: a look from the South

Grids have emerged as wide-scale, distributed infrastructures providing enough resources for always more demanding scientific experiments. EGEE is one of the largest scientific grids in production operation today, with over 220 sites and more than 30,000 CPU all over the world. A further evolution of EGEE needs to be based on knowledge of deficiencies and bottleneck of the current infrastructure and software. To provide this knowledge we analyzed nine months of job submissions on the south-east federation of EGEE. We provide information on how users submit their jobs: throughput, bursts, requirements, VO. We study the current behavior of EGEE middleware too, by evaluating its performance and the retry policy. We finally show that even if the middleware provides advanced functionality, most submissions are still embarrassingly parallel jobs.