Computing Systems

Virtual Machines for physics analysis

We are in the process of testing the use of dedicated VMs to run physics analysis tasks.
A presentation on the topic can be found at https://indico.cern.ch/event/1209824/

At the moment we have access to some 16-core VMs with 80 GB of RAM and about 600 GB of fast disks. The machines are owned and managed by CMS VOC, and so requests related to it (e.g. installing software) go through tickes on CMSVOC JIRA portal

Available machines:

Machine	Analysis team	Login e-group(s)	Notes
vocms1000	Higgs analyses	cmg-analysis-vm-higgs	RHEL 8
vocms1001	Testing	ep-dep-cmg-cern	RHEL 8
vocms1002	HGCAL	ep-dep-cmg-cern	Alma 9
vocms1003	TBD	ep-dep-cmg-cern	RHEL 8
vocms1004	TBD	ep-dep-cmg-cern	RHEL 8
vocms1005	TBD	ep-dep-cmg-cern	RHEL 8

Useful information for RHEL 8 machines:

• /eos and /cvmfs are mounted, and some basic software installed (e.g. git, eos client, root, singularity)
• if at login you get an error about .bash_profile: Permission denied, just do kinit, aklog and source .bash_profile (it happens to some people when logging in via ssh from a macbook with kerberos authentication…)
• if you need to run CMSSW,source /cvmfs/cms.cern.ch/cmsset_default.sh and then most recent releases exist also for el8_amd64_gccXXX, or you can use singularity (e.g. cmssw-cc7 etc)
• outside CMSSW, a reasonably complete software stack can be loaded with source /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/views/LCG_104a_cuda/x86_64-centos8-gcc11-opt/setup.sh (see list of packages)