PDSF Home

Atlas at PDSF

• PDSF home page
• PDSF for Atlas
• How to gain access
• Globus software
• Atlas software
• Status and current load
• Atlas-specific PDSF FAQ's

PDSF for Atlas
PDSF is a computing facility available to High Energy and Nuclear Physics users. To learn more about the facility itself visit out home page . Amount of resources available to any user group depends on group's financial contribution towards procurements of the cluster hardware and software. Current Atlas contribution guarantees 2% of total CPU and some storage space . Rather than being an allocation, this is closer to a guaranteed current minimum. Each of the user groups (including atlas) can make use of any idle resources exceeding the original share without incurring any penalty. Each atlas user has also access to the NERSC mass storage .

How to gain access
In order to use PDSF resources either via GRID or locally, atlas collaborators need to obtain regular unix accounts . Additionally, to be listed in PDSF grid mapfile a user needs to submit a request with relevant information.

Globus Software
PDSF has a Globus Toolkit 2.0 installed and a gatekeeper running on pdsfgrid01.nersc.gov, pdsfgrid02.nersc.gov and pdsfgrid03.nersc.gov.
Globus clients can be run on any of the PDSF interactive nodes (pdsfint.nersc.gov). Users can configure their Globus client environment by loading a globus module:

module load globus

Atlas-specific PDSF FAQ's

• How to access Atlas cvs k-server?
  To access the Atlas cvs k-server, a user has to secure first a Kerberos-4 ticket (at CERN this is done automatically when you log in, but PDSF uses a different authentication model so you have to do it "bu hand"). A Kerberos-4 ticket is generated by running:

  /usr/local/pkg/krb4/bin/kinit username@CERN.CH
  

  (watch out for the upper case) and giving your CERN password. After that you need to use a cvs client that was built against Kerberos-4 libraries. Since the RH 7.2 upgrade it is our default version of cvs, so no need to load the cvs module any more. Simply follow the instructions for Working with the ATLAS cvs repository. When you are done with your cvs transactions it is a good practice to destroy the ticket:

  /usr/local/pkg/krb4/bin/kdestroy
  

  We did not put Kerberos-4 kinit and kdestroy into your path because many of you use Kerberos-5 in transactions with FERMILAB and that could cause confusion.

• How to set up local Atlas development environment
  Add to your .cshrc

  (from Paolo)
  module load gcc/2.95.2
  setenv CMTSITE LBNL
  (from Iwona)
  module load binutils
  

  The last load gives you a loader from RH 6.1. The RH 6.2 loader cannot handle some of the Atlas linking and produces really bizzare errors. Paolo also "ported" David's super-setup system to PDSF. Look into his pdsf ~calaf/.cmt/requirements and drq_setup.csh. If you plan to use it, add this two aliases to your cshrc:

  alias setup "source ${HOME}/.cmt/drq_setup.csh"
  alias setuphere 'setenv CMTPATH `pwd`:$CMTPATH'
  

  so that you can e.g. say:

  setup 4.1.0
  cd your_test_release
  setuphere