CMS Analysis Facility

MIT’s CMS Analysis Facility is a large Tier-2 computing center built for CMS user analyses. We’re looking into the viability of using it for STAR computing.

Initial Setup

First things first. I went to http://www2.lns.mit.edu/compserv/cms-acctappl.html and applied for a local account. The welcome message contained a link to the CMSAF User Guide found on this TWiki page.

AFS isn’t available on CMSAF, so I started a local tree at /osg/app/star/afs_rhic and began to copy over stuff. Here’s a list of what I copied so far (nodes are running SL 4.4):

CERNLIB
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/asis/sl4/slc4_ia32_gcc345/cern

OPTSTAR
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/i386_sl4/opt/star/sl44_gcc346

GROUP_DIR
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/group

ROOT 5.12.00
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/ROOT/5.12.00/root
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/ROOT/5.12.00/.sl44_gcc346

SL07e (sl44_gcc346 only)
/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/packages/SL07e

I copied these precompiled libraries over instead of building them myself because of a tricky problem with the interactive nodes’ configuration. The main gateway node is a 64-bit machine, so regular attempts at compilation produce 64-bit libraries that we can’t use. CMSAF has a node reserved for 32-bit builds, but it’s running SL 3.0.5. We’re still working on a proper resolution of that problem. Perhaps we can force cons to do 32-bit compilations.

The environment scripts are working, although I had to add more hacks than I thought were necessary. I only changed the following files:

  1. ~/.login
  2. ~/.cshrc
  3. $GROUP_DIR/site_post_setup.csh

It doesn’t seem possible to change the default login shell (chsh and ypchsh both fail), so when you login you need to type “tcsh” to get a working STAR environment (after copying my .login and .cshrc to your home directory, of course).

Basic interactive tests look good, and I’ve got a SUMS configuration that will do local job submissions to the Condor system (that’s a topic for another post). DB calls use the MIT database mirror. I think that’s all for now.

STAR Scheduler Configuration

I deployed a private build of SUMS (roughly 1.8.10) on CMSAF and made the following changes to globalConfig.xml to get local job submission working:

In the Queue List

In the Policy List

Now for the Dispatcher

And finally, here's the site configuration block