The Higgs appears

This year we haven't been great at keeping up with blog posts but there are many reasons behind this. We have installed a new network, additional cores taking us up to 4000 available job slots and have upgraded the server infrastructure throughout  GU Scotgrid's cluster. Also, we have fallen foul of infrastructure issues and have had problems with the old and replacement Air Con systems. Slowly, we are extracting ourselves from these issues and  recently Professor David Britton gave a lecture on the Grids role in the announcement made in July of this year at CERN during this years Turing Festival. A surprise appearance at the event was Professor Higgs himself.

Professors David Britton (left) and Professor Peter Higgs

Also presenting at the event were Professors Tejinder Singh Virdee and John Ellis of Imperial College and Dr Ben Segal from CERN. The event was one of the kickstart activites for the Turing Festival and enabled the public and academics to get a better over view of what has been involved in getting the experiments this far.

GridPP At The Top Of Europe

This news article appeared on the GridPP website and is worth reposting to our blog as it gives an overview of the collaborations efforts to date within the WLCG and with the Non High Energy Physics (HEP) communities.
GridPP At The Top Of Europe

Multiple VO Woes

Steve Lloyd and I sat down after lunch today to try and get to the bottom of why his dteam submitted jobs always fail. Strangely this seems to be a RB specific problem. IC always works, Glasgow always fails and RAL seems to come and go.

Using the Glasgow RB we submitted a job to Edinburgh, so that we could trace things through the batch system. The job arrived at Edinburgh, and ran through the batch system. However, it continued to be considered by the RB as

Current Status: Scheduled
Status Reason: Job successfully submitted to Globus

Clearly this was not the case.

We had a good look through the logs on the RB, but there's no particular sign of things going wrong there - although it must be said that the logs are both dense and impenetrable.

When it became clear that there was no easy solution I decided to try and reproduce the problem myself. Now, recall I had joined gridpp a while ago to help our local users and never had any trouble. However, now I can't seem to get a single job running through as a gridpp member - even on the Glasgow cluster. And things are in fact even worse than for Steve, because my gatekeeper process dies almost instantly, so the job never even goes into the batch system:

grep 2007-07-10.14:49:10.0000028268.0000113028 /var/log/messages
Jul 10 14:49:16 svr016 gridinfo[9672]: JMA 2007/07/10 14:49:16 GATEKEEPER_JM_ID 2007-07-10.14:49:10.0000028268.0000113028 for /C=UK/O=eScience/OU=Glasgow/L=Compserv/CN=graeme stewart on 130.209.239.23
Jul 10 14:49:16 svr016 gridinfo[9672]: JMA 2007/07/10 14:49:16 GATEKEEPER_JM_ID 2007-07-10.14:49:10.0000028268.0000113028 mapped to gridpp001 (17601, 10016)
Jul 10 14:49:16 svr016 gridinfo[9672]: JMA 2007/07/10 14:49:16 GATEKEEPER_JM_ID 2007-07-10.14:49:10.0000028268.0000113028 has GRAM_SCRIPT_JOB_ID 1184075356:lcgpbs:internal_434559272:9672.1184075355 manager type lcgpbs
Jul 10 14:49:16 svr016 gridinfo[9672]: JMA 2007/07/10 14:49:16 GATEKEEPER_JM_ID 2007-07-10.14:49:10.0000028268.0000113028 JM exiting

I'll now try and poke around inside the gatekeeper logs and see if I can come up with any indication why things are going wrong.

And what the hell's this got to do with the RB anyway? It's deeply puzzling and frustrating in equal measure.

ScotGrid Hosts GridPP 18

GridPP 18 was hosted at Glasgow this week. The weather was good, the wireless network more or less survived and lots of people came to see the machine room. I had a good time - it was nice to play host.

You can read my presentation on the Tier-2 in case you slept in or weren't at the meeting.

New VOs at Glasgow: camont, gridpp, totalep

I've enabled the camont, gridpp and totalep VOs on the Glasgow cluster.

A complete description of how to do this is on the wiki.

This stupidest task must have been to write a script to reverse engineer a YAIM users.conf file from our group/passwd files so that the YAIM utility functions like users_getvogroup work. There's surely an easier way of doing that?

This afternoon I'll redo the RB and try and run some jobs through as a gridpp VO member.