Introduction
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.
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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
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- This is an area that SLAC and the Analysis Computing Facility is constantly looking to improve. Please give us your feed back by sending e-mail to SLAC ACF mailing list atlas-us-slac-acf@cern.ch
- If your home directory is on AFS (which is not visible from the JupyterLab), you can still request a GPFS data directory - send your request to unix-admin@slac.stanford.edu, indicating that "I want a GPFS data directory under /gpfs/slac/atlas/fs1/d/<my_user_name>".
- With JupyROOT (ROOT C++) and remote data access (via xroot or webdav/http protocol), it is possible to run ProofLite even inside a JupyROOT notebook
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 on RHEL6 interactive login nodes
- 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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- ATLAS specific info on LSF
- For 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