Computing in the CDF trailers

Situation

• It is widely known now that the trailer's offices will host several hundreds of desktop PC's running Linux. We take this as de-facto.
• In 1999 an ad-hoc committee discussed how to best make use of those machines. The final report gave general guidelines but no specific details on how to configure the machines.
• The present and planned architecture of the CDF Central Analysis Facility at FCC and of the network between FCC and trailers (Gigabig ethernet) define the trailers PC's as place for:
  • code development
  • n-tuple analysis
  • repeated analysis on small (order of 100GB) data sets
  We take this as de-facto as well.
• The last year experience suggests that more standardization could help reduce the work load on setting-up, mantaining these machines, and augment their usefulness to general users.

Request for feedback

• To assess if that is really true, and in case what the guidelines would be, I would like to collect informations from the institutions about the following:
  1. do people in general prefer to avoid the need for anybody in their group to manage your trailers machines ?
  2. Or do universities/people on the contrary expect that no matter what they will prefere do most work themselves anyhow.
  3. are the user's needs common enough that a standard default configuration can be specified and used on all machines ? (Members of the CDF task force have also signaled a liking for some standared here).
• I encourage everybody to express their views/concerns by e-mail to the ICRB distribution list.
• From this poll we will understand if computing in the trailer is a matter of concern for the board or not, and what to do about it in case we have to do something.

Chair's opinions

1. better wait some time to have problems fixed by CDF task force then waist time fixing those myself. 99% of the times I can still do usefull works while waiting.
2. all PC's in one NIS domain, anybody can log on any machine
3. a way for machine owners to limit access is desirable but not mandatory
4. the system disk on each machine only has the system and a scratch area, so system upgrades are always easy
5. this local scratch area is mounted as /cdf/scratch
6. /cdf/home and /cdf/spool from FCC fileserver are mounted NFS
7. user's login directories are on /cdf/home
8. cdfsoftware and all products are available from one trailer server using the same path as on central machines
9. this software distributin should include a set of usefull pre-build binaries:
   • Edm*,AC++Dump, cdf(2)Sim, TRIGSim, Production, Display, ...
10. as a result the user's offline environment transport transparently from FCC to trailers and newrel directory trees stay the same
11. additional local (to the machine) disks can be configured with private data areas as desidered by the machine owner(s)
12. these local disk areas can be cross mounted with the same mount point name (e.g. /ncdf30/data1) via NFS on more machines as desired by those machine owner(s)
13. it would be desirable to have an automated tools so that machine owner(s) can do the two above without human intervention by CDF task force
14. all in all I am willing to pay 300$ for each PC for a good batch system (LSF)
15. there should be an authomatic daemon that cleans up the scratch area