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SIENews

The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza N. 58 - May/June 2017

New application for permit requests

The web application for travel requests has been in operation for a little more than one year, and has made the process of filing a travel request much quicker and more efficient. Older "Comisiones de Servicio" can be copied and modified only in the relevant parts to create a new one. This application produces an XML file which can be automatically imported in SAP. The success of this application has prompted the Administration Department to ask us to expand it to include vacations, free days, and many other kinds of permit. We have been happy to help, and since last month it has been in production with no important issues. The next step will probably be making it completely paperless, as part of a more general and wide-range effort by the IAC in this direction.

camelot-snr, a python-based command line ETC for CAMELOT

If you are a regular user of the IAC's CAMELOT CCD camera, you may be happy to know that we have developed a command line tool for the Exposure Time Calculator. It implements all the options available in the online version, except plots. You will find it especially useful for carrying out repeated estimations with different values of the input parameters.
Its use is pretty simple. For instance, for a 12 magnitude star in V band and 30s of exposure time, just type in your Linux terminal:
camelot-snr -f V -m 12 -e 30
You can also provide the input parameters using a text file. For further details and options, please read the help with camelot-snr --help

Statistics for Supercomputing at the IAC - semester 17A

As every end of semester, we publish the statistics of the CPU time used by our researchers at the main IAC's Supercomputing resources:
  • TeideHPC: 1,410,099 hours
  • LaPalma: 363,337 hours (+ 688,089 hours consumed by RES, total: 1,051,426 hours)
  • HTCondor: 764,545 hours
  • TOTAL: 2,537,981 hours.
The total number of hours used by IAC researchers is 13.3% higher than in the same period last year, going over 2.5M hours (one single CPU performing sequential calculations would need about 3 centuries to reach that amount of computing time). The most remarkable news of this period are the restrictions on TeideHPC usage, and the shutdown of MareNostrum3 in Barcelona (the most powerful Supercomputer in Spain, used by many IAC researchers) for its upgrading. The restrictions on TeideHPC were set due to its high load: we were cut off from it altogether for some weeks around march, and afterwards we could only use 60 concurrent nodes at most. This number was increased up to 150 yesterday. To help our users to plan their executions on TeideHPC, we developed some tools which can be used to know the current usage statistics. As for MareNostrum3, its shutdown and the restrictions on TeideHPC prompted some IAC's researchers to use again the LaPalma Supercomputer, which executed 200% more hours than the same period last year. The new MareNostrum4 will be available starting today, June 30.

We would also like to mention two more points:
First, we are using the IAC's TeideHPC distribution mailing list to inform not only about issues about the TeideHPC Supercomputer, but also about other general supercomputing topics such as courses, grants, conferences, workshops, etc. If you are not using TeideHPC, but still want to receive useful info about supercomputing, please send us an email and we will include you in the mailing list.
Second, last weeks have seen a huge increment of HTCondor usage. HTCondor uses a fair distribution algorithm to allocate slots to each users. If your HTCondor user priority is a critical factor to you, you can avoid lowering it by using the NiceUser option, especially worthwhile when you are the only user in the queue, or when a huge number of slots is available. We have developed a script to dynamically change the NiceUser attribute of your jobs: the script, together with detailed explanations, can be found at FAQ about Priority in HTCondor.

III European HTCondor Workshop 2017

The III European HTCondor Workshop took place the first week of June at DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchroton) in Hamburg, Germany. The IAC participated in the Organising Committee, together with the American Universities where HTCondor is developed and with other European institutions which use it massively (CERN, DESY, PIC, EC-JRC, STFC-RAL, etc.). With about 70 participants, there were many interesting talks about new features and how HTCondor is used by research centers, with special focus on Cloud Computing and Docker containers. If you are interested in some of these talks, all slides are publicly available. Although date and place are not final, the IV European HTCondor Workshop will probably be held in late June or in September 2018, and will give special emphasis to users' experiences (the IAC will again participate in the Organising Committee). We encourage our HTCondor users to attend and present their work; we will inform you all in due time about dates and location.
As an aside, we'd like to mention that our HTCondor tutorial in the SIEpedia was cited several times by developers and other institutions, apparently being one of the most complete references for beginners and average users, while the extensive documentation available at the main HTCondor website mainly caters to system admins and advanced users. (Indeed some institutions links to our pages as main documentation about HTCondor.)

Transfer.sh, a command line alternative for sharing files

Often we need to transfer files that far exceed the size permitted by the email server. There are several options: one can use RedIris's file sender, or the IAC's Owncloud service. In a previous Newsletter issue we recommended the use of wetransfer.com. Recently, we have become aware of transfer.sh, which has the big advantage that it can be used from the command line, and no registration or log in is required.
For instance, to transfer to a third party (say some collaborator of ours) the file ./cdmetal3d.tar (about 450 MB) we use the command:
curl --upload-file ./cdmetal3d.tar https://transfer.sh/
which, after a few minutes, returns the URL of the file location in the transfer.sh server:
https://transfer.sh/EhplD/cdmetal3d.tar
This URL can then be sent to our collaborator, who can retrieve the file with wget or from the browser, for instance:
wget -cNS https://transfer.sh/EhplD/cdmetal3d.tar.
Files up to 10 GB can be uploaded, and are stored for two weeks. Further details and usage examples can be found in the https://transfer.sh/ website.
SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 58 - May/June 2017 - Contact: