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)