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The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza N. 41 - July/August 2011
Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.

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.
SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 41 - July/August 2011 - Contact: