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SLAC hosts a shared analysis computing facility for the US ATLAS members. The center provides CPU, disk space and software tools to support both Grid and non-Grid based physics analysis activities.

Getting started to obtain a SLAC computer account

This information is for users who want direct access to SLAC computers, not accessing SLAC computing resources via the GRID. The steps listed here may take days to complete here so plan early.

Register as a SLAC User

Related page: https://atlas.slac.stanford.edu/user-registration

Please complete the SLAC User Information Form to register to the SLAC User Organization. It should be done before you apply for SLAC computer accounts. Charles C. Young will be your "SLAC sponsor who will confirm your information" on the SLAC User Information Form. If you can not find your home institute in the pull down list during the online registration, you should contact Charlie Young before registration. When you received notification of user registration, go to http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/phonebook/search.html, enter your name, and look up your System ID. It is needed when requesting computer account. 

Obtain a SLAC Unix computer account

Related Page: https://atlas.slac.stanford.edu/computer-account

SLAC provides several types of computer accounts. For ATLAS related work, you need a UNIX account. A Windows account is also very useful if you will visit or stay at SLAC, or your want to access protected SLAC web pages. A Microsoft Exchange e-mail account is the preferred way to use SLAC e-mail.

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Please set your UNIX .forward file so that automatically generated e-mail notifications from the batch system, cron jobs, etc. will be forwarded to your preferred address. Simply put a line "your_email@domain.earth" in $HOME/.forward will work. If your preferred address is a SLAC Exchange e-mail, this line will be "your_exchange_username@exchange.slac.stanford.edu".

Subscribe to e-group

Please go to CERN e-group and (search and) subscribe to atlas-us-slac-acf. We will use this e-group for announcement and for user discussion specific to the SLAC-ACF. If you do not have an CERN account to subscribe to this e-group by yourself, please e-mail yangw@slac.stanford.edu to have your email address added to the group.

Login to SLAC

SLAC provides a pool of login nodes with CVMFS and Grid tools. You can access them by ssh to rhel6-64.slac.stanford.edu. Assuming your unix shell is /bin/bash, you may use the following as a template of your $HOME/.bashrc file

# setup ATLAS environment
export RUCIO_ACCOUNT="change_me"
export ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE=/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/ATLASLocalRootBase
source ${ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE}/user/atlasLocalSetup.sh --quiet
localSetupRucioClients --quiet
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 Type "alias" command to see additional "localSetupXXXX" commands.

Remote X window access

Please refer to SLAC's FastX page for detail instructions.

Disk space

SLAC provides to new ATLAS users two personal storage spaces

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• From the interactive login machines, one can browse the Xrootd storage by cd /xrootd/atlas
• From batch jobs, one can't list directory in the Xrootd storage. But can access files via root://atlrdr1//xrootd/atlas/...
• Using the rucio tools, one can list ATLAS datasets that are already in the Xrootd storage system via command rucio list-datasets-rse <RSE>, where RSE can be SLACXRD_DATADISK, SLACXRD_LOCALGROUPDISK, SLACXRD_SCRATCHDISK.

Submit batch jobs

SLAC uses LSF batch system. LSF replica your current environment setup when submitting jobs. This includes your current working directory and any Unix environment variable setups. The following are examples of using LSF:

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For more information regarding high performance computing clusters, including LSF related documents and best practices, please refer to the SLAC High Performance Computing page. 

Resource monitoring

Coming soon