Oxford University Particle Physics Unix Overview

1. Oxford University Particle Physics Unix Overview Pete Gronbech Particle Physics Senior Systems Manager & GridPP Project Manager Graduate Lectures

2. Graduate Lectures Strategy Local Cluster Overview Connecting to it Grid Cluster Computer Rooms How to get help

3. Particle Physics Strategy The Server / Desktop Divide Virtual Machine Host Servers General Purpose Unix Server Linux Worker nodes Group DAQ Systems Linux FileServers Web Server NIS Server torque Server Win 7 PC Ubuntu PC Win 7 PC laptop Linux Desktop Clients Graduate Lectures

4. Distributed Model Graduate Lectures Files are not stored on the machine you are using, but on remote locations You can run a different operating system by making a remote connection to it

5. Recommended working strategy Graduate Lectures • Computing work splits broadly into • Office work (local/remote) • Writing code (remote) • Computation (remote) • Use your favourite desktop/laptop for office files. • Make a remote desktop connection to pplxint8/9to do computing work on the batch farm • It is better to write codeon the remote Linux desktop

6. Physics Remote desktops Graduate Lectures We use RDP for remote desktop This means that everyone in particle physics has access to multiple desktop environments from anywhere Windows (termserv.physics.ox.ac.uk) Scientific Linux (pplxint8/9) Ubuntu Linux (ubuntu-trusty-ts) MaxOSX (osxts via vnc)

7. Storage Physics storage . Windows server Central Linux file-server PP file-server Storage system: Graduate Lectures

8. To store files on servers using your laptop Graduate Lectures • Windows: map your H:\ drive by typing • net use H: https://winfe.physics.ox.ac.uk/home/yourname /USER:yourname - Where yourname is your physics user name • OSX: http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/it-services/connecting-to-physics-file-servers-from-os-x • Linux: http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/it-services/access-windows-shares-from-linux

9. RDP and storage demo H:\ drive on windows Connecting to Linux on pplxint8 from windows /home and /data on Linux Graduate Lectures

10. Particle Physics Linux Graduate Lectures • Unix Team (Room 661): • Vipul Davda – Grid and Local Support • Kashif Mohammad – Grid and Local Support • Pete Gronbech - Senior Systems Manager and GridPP Project Manager • General purpose interactive Linux based systems for code development, short tests and access to Linux based office applications. These are accessed remotely. • Batch queues are provided for longer and intensive jobs. Provisioned to meet peak demand and give a fast turnaround for final analysis. • Our Local Systems run Scientific Linux (SL) which is a free Red Hat Enterprise based distribution. • The same as the Grid and CERN • We will be able to offer you the most help running your code on SL6.

11. Current Clusters Graduate Lectures Particle Physics Local Batch cluster Oxford’s Tier 2 Grid cluster

12. PP Linux Batch Farm Scientific Linux 6 Users log in to the interactive nodes pplxint8 & 9, the home directories and all the data disks (/home area or /data/group ) are shared across the cluster and visible on the interactive machines and all the batch system worker nodes. Approximately 600 cores (incl. 128 cores for JAI/LWFA), each with 4GB of RAM memory. The /home area is where you should keep your important text files such as source code, papers and thesis The/data/ area is where you should put your big reproducible input and output data jailxwn02 64 * AMD cores jailxwn01 64 * AMD cores pplxwn68 16 * Intel cores pplxwn67 16 * Intel cores pplxwnnn 16 * Intel 2650 cores pplxwn41 16 * Intel 2650 cores pplxwn32 12 * Intel 5650 cores pplxwn31 12 * Intel 5650 cores Grid data transfer nodes pplxdatatrans pplxint9 Interactive login nodes pplxint8 Graduate Lectures

13. PP Linux Batch Farm Data Storage NFS and lustre storage Servers 40TB The /data areas are big and fast disks. This is too big to be backed-up but still have some redundancy features and are safer than laptop storage. This does not help if you delete files. Data Areas pplxfsn 40TB The /home areas are backed up by two different systems nightly. The latest nightly backup of any lost or deleted files from your home directory is available at the read-only location /data/homebackup/{username} If you need older files, tell us If you need more space on /home, tell us Store your thesis on /home NOT /data. Data Areas pplxfsn 30TB Data Areas pplxfsn 19TB Home areas pplxfsn Graduate Lectures

14. Local Oxford DWB Physics Infrastructure Computer Room Completely separate from the Begbroke Science park a computer room with 100KW cooling and >200KW power has been built. ~£150K Oxford Physics money. Local Physics department Infrastructure computer room. Completed September 2007. This allowed local computer rooms to be refurbished as offices again and racks that were in unsuitable locations to be re housed. Graduate Lectures

15. Two Computer Rooms provide excellent infrastructure for the future The New Computer room built at Begbroke Science Park jointly for the Oxford Super Computer and the Physics department, provides space for 55 (11KW) computer racks. 22 of which will be for Physics. Up to a third of these can be used for the Tier 2 centre. This £1.5M project was funded by SRIF and a contribution of ~£200K from Oxford Physics. The room was ready in December 2007. Oxford Tier 2 Grid cluster was moved there during spring 2008. All new Physics High Performance Clusters will be installed here. Graduate Lectures

16. Graduate Lectures

17. Strong Passwords etc Graduate Lectures • Use a strong password not open to dictionary attack! • fred123 – No good • Uaspnotda!09 – Much better • More convenient to use ssh with a passphrased key stored on your desktop. • Once set up

18. Connecting with PuTTY to Linux Graduate Lectures Demo • Plain ssh terminal connection • From ‘outside of physics’ • From Office (no password) • ssh with X windows tunnelled to passive exceed. Single apps. • Password-less access from ‘outside physics’ http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/it-services/ppunix/ppunix-cluster http://www.howtoforge.com/ssh_key_based_logins_putty

19. Graduate Lectures

20. Other resources (for free) Graduate Lectures • Oxford Advanced Research Computing • A shared cluster of CPU nodes, “just” like the local cluster here • GPU nodes • Faster for ‘fitting’, toy studies and MC generation • *IFF* code is written in a way that supports them • Moderate disk space allowance per experiment (<5TB) • http://www.arc.ox.ac.uk/content/getting-started • The Grid • Massive globally connected computer farm • For big computing projects • Atlas, LHCb, t2k and SNO please stay at the end! • Come talk to us in RM 661 about these

21. The end of the overview Graduate Lectures • Now more details of use of the clusters • Help Pages • http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/it-services/unix-systems • http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/research/particle-physics/particle-physics-computer-support • ARC • http://www.arc.ox.ac.uk/content/getting-started • Email • pp_unix_admin@physics.ox.ac.uk • GRID talk at the end

22. GRID certificates Atlas, Sno, LHCb and t2k please read this Graduate Lectures

23. SouthGrid Member Institutions • Oxford • RAL PPD • Cambridge • Birmingham • Bristol • Sussex • JET at Culham Graduate Lectures

24. Current capacity Graduate Lectures • Compute Servers • Twin and twin squared nodes • 2500 CPU cores • Storage • Total of ~1000TB • The servers have between 12 and 36 disks, the more recent ones are 4TB capacity each. These use hardware RAID and UPS to provide resilience.

25. You will then need to contact central Oxford IT. They will need to see you, with your university card, to approve your request: To: help@it.ox.ac.uk Dear Stuart Robeson and Jackie Hewitt, I Please let me know a good time to come over to Banbury road IT office for you to approve my grid certificate request. Thanks. Get a Grid Certificate Must remember to use the same PC to request and retrieve the Grid Certificate. The new UKCA page http://www.ngs.ac.uk/ukca uses a JAVA based CERT WIZARD Graduate Lectures

26. When you have your grid certificate… Save to a filename in your home directory on the Linux systems, eg: Y:\Linuxusers\particle\home\{username}\mycert.p12 Graduate Lectures Log in to pplxint9 and run mkdir .globus chmod 700 .globus cd .globus openssl pkcs12 -in ../mycert.p12 -clcerts -nokeys -out usercert.pem openssl pkcs12 -in ../mycert.p12 -nocerts -out userkey.pem chmod 400 userkey.pem chmod 444 usercert.pem

27. Now Join a VO Graduate Lectures • This is the Virtual Organisation such as “Atlas”, so: • You are allowed to submit jobs using the infrastructure of the experiment • Access data for the experiment • Speak to your colleagues on the experiment about this. It is a different process for every experiment!

28. Joining a VO Graduate Lectures Your grid certificate identifies you to the grid as an individual user, but it's not enough on its own to allow you to run jobs; you also need to join a Virtual Organisation (VO). These are essentially just user groups, typically one per experiment, and individual grid sites can choose to support (or not) work by users of a particular VO. Most sites support the four LHC VOs, fewer support the smaller experiments. The sign-up procedures vary from VO to VO, UK ones typically require a manual approval step, LHC ones require an active CERN account. For anyone that's interested in using the grid, but is not working on an experiment with an existing VO, we have a local VO we can use to get you started.

29. When that’s done Graduate Lectures Test your grid certificate: > voms-proxy-init–vomslhcb.cern.ch Enter GRID pass phrase: Your identity: /C=UK/O=eScience/OU=Oxford/L=OeSC/CN=j bloggs Creating temporary proxy ..................................... Done Consult the documentation provided by your experiment for ‘their’ way to submit and manage grid jobs

30. BACKUP Graduate Lectures

31. Puttygen to create an ssh key on Windows (previous slide point #4) Paste this into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on pplxint Enter a secure passphrase then : - Enter a strong passphrase - Save the private parts of the key to a subdirectory of your local drive. Graduate Lectures

32. Pageant Graduate Lectures Run Pageant once after login Right-click on the pageant symbol and and “Add key” for your Private (windows ssh key)