Compute resources & background information¶
The National Analysis Facility (NAF) is a multi-purpose batch-cluster optimized for high throughput running HTCondor as a scheduling system.
The "NAF in one sentence" and how to get access
The National Analysis Facility at DESY complements the DESY Grid resources, offers compute, storage, services and support for all German scientists working on ATLAS, CMS and ILC, als well as the global Belle collaboration. You want access to the NAF? Read how to get an account and access
Quick start & hint for best throughput
Use an interactive batchsession for a quick lookaround and testing, see: Interactive batchsession
Submit 'standard jobs' that will claim 1core, 2gb of memory and 3h of runtime to benefit from oversubscription to everybody elses quota. Only these standard jobs allow you to use all slots available in the pool, ignoring any quotation limits of your group !
Questions and Problems
if you encounter a problem while running on the NAF, you can always contact the IT staff for help how to best write a ticket to help the IT staff helping you, please check Creating a IT ticket best practices please check Getting support and FAQ for which support mail addresses are best suited for a problem
If you are 'new' to HTCondor we strongly recommend this talk/tutorial by Todd Tannenbaum, which will give you a general overview on HTCondor and a perfect introduction on how to use it, 20 minutes well spent !
Short overview
The HTC system features
~10.000 CPU cores (more to be added after migration to EL9 ~ 14.000 cores then)
fair share load distribution and quota handling
integration of DESY wide batch resources
sophisticated resource handling in single and multi core environments
afs and kerberos support for authentication and resource access
afs and dust mounts on all poolnodes
runs on HTCondor (HTC)
Short example: A walk-through: See separate page on the left
Job Environment Variables: Job Environment Variables
Since the end of April 2018 we care for setting up the shell environment: - As done also on Gridengine we set up the standard user environment - At a minimum PATH and USER are always set to a minimum/standard value - If you use the ClassAd "getenv = True" switch (which is not recommended) you might also set the ClassAd "setENV = False", if you believe that the full submit host environment is usable and valid for your selected batch worker nodes
The HTCondor itself sets a very limited shell environment:
BATCH_SYSTEM=HTCondor KRB5CCNAME=FILE:/var/lib/condor/execute/dir_
Simple Overview on BIRD Resources:
Resources:
FAQ(web): FAQ
Online statistics:
We are still working on a final version, in the meantime, use Day Statistics
Issues and ticket summary: What issues and tickets are currently going on? Have a look at our summary page. Note: This is an experimental service using a locally hosted chatbot trained on the current NAF documentation.
Contact:
naf (dash) helpdesk (at) desy (dot) de : NAF request tracker
bird (dot) service (at) desy (dot) de : Operational issues