Condor/Diodo/LaPalma Hall of Fame
Time to publish the usage statistics of the Supercomputing resources at the IAC
for the first semester of 2011. In total, 1240647.33 CPU hours (a 52.27% increase
over the previous semester) were delivered during this period. By resource, Condor
delivered 875119.7 CPU hours, LaPalma 283101.63 and Diodo 82426.00. Full details
of the breakdown by users can be found at the SIE Forum for
Condor,
LaPalma and
Diodo.
If you want a piece of this pie and don't know how to start, just let
us know.
Summer Condor Tips
Well, nothing particularly summerish about these tips, but they will help you
avoid some common problems found by heavy Condor users. Get in touch with us
if you encounter problems trying to put these into practice.
- Avoiding black holes: a common problem found
by many users is when some execute
machine is misconfigured or broken in such a way that it still accepts Condor
jobs, but can't run them correctly. If jobs exit quickly on this kind of machine,
it can quickly eat many of the jobs in your queue. To avoid this, you can follow
the advice in
https://condor-wiki.cs.wisc.edu/index.cgi/wiki?p=AvoidingBlackHoles.
- Choosing machines based on Kernel
(or any other machine characteristic): right
now all our Condor PCs are Linux x86_64, but not all of them have the same kernel
(we have 3 FedoraCore12 and 5 FedoraCore8 variants), which can cause trouble
depending on the code you want to run with Condor. It is now very easy to add
tags to machines to identify which version they are running, so that your Condor
jobs can choose only the correct ones (to see the kernel in a given machine
you can run for example: condor_status -l italia.iac.es
| grep -i sie_kernel | sort -u). Actually, this is an esay way of creating
groups of machines in
Condor (for example, machines that have access to a tape drive, or a sofware
license, etc.).
Moodle no longer supported - please migrate
to ULL's Moodle
The current installation of Moodle
(
http://research.iac.es/ensenanza/aula/), made
by the SIE a few years back, will no longer be supported. The installed version
has become obsolete, and the SIE has no personnel available to make a much needed
upgrade before the new academic year begins. All lecturers are invited to migrate
their Moodle material to the ULL's Moodle,
http://campusvirtual.ull.es/. The
process is quick and easy: Angel made a copy of the Moodle data for his courses,
imported them in the ULL's Moodle, and everything worked just right and took
perhaps five minutes or so. Please ask him if you have questions or need help.
Migration of websites to the SIE's web server
(almost) completed
At last, we managed to migrate to the SIE's Web server, rialto, the websites
that still were missing: the two twikis (goya and emir), and eGroupWare. We are
still trying to solve some problems that showed up with the migration, but in
a few days these websites will be made available to all their users (meanwhile
access is restricted). If you manage or just use project or conference websites,
we warmly invite you to check that all is fine: pages display as they are expected
to, user's login works, etc. We have set up a webpage illustrating all the issues
related to the server migration, and in particular on how to update and distribute
changes from the development/test server (marta) to the external webserver (rialto):
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/SINFIN/IAConly/new_web_servers.php.