The machine/job features mechanism

Within the HEPiX virtualization group and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid’s Machine/Job Features Task Force, a mechanism has been developed which provides access to detailed information about the current host and the current job to the job itself. This allows user payloads to access meta information, independent of the current batch system or virtual machine model. The information can be accessed either locally via the filesystem on a worker node, or remotely via HTTP(S) from a webserver. This paper describes the final version of the specification from 2016 which was published as an HEP Software Foundation technical note, and the design of the implementations of this version for batch and virtual machine platforms. We discuss early experiences with these implementations and how they can be exploited by experiment frameworks.