Posts by David Cameron

21) Message boards : ATLAS application : Native Atlas Guide (Message 47060) Posted 3 Aug 2022 by David Cameron Post: The steps required to run native ATLAS depend heavily on the OS you are using, so it's hard to provide a single guide that works for everyone. But there are instructions available for specific platforms, eg Ubuntu 20.04. The options for running ATLAS Linux are listed in this post: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5630&postid=44620#44620 I see now that all your tasks are successfully completing so feel free to share what you had to do to make it work :)
22) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS vbox v2.01 (Message 46960) Posted 28 Jun 2022 by David Cameron Post: It seems this version is causing many failures... hm, strange. Here it worked well on all of my machines (Windows). Yes, it seems to work on some machines and not others. It all looked ok when we tested it on the dev project too. But many hosts fail immediately with an error like this: 2022-06-28 10:54:08 (153184): Error in start VM for VM: -1073741819 Command: VBoxManage -q startvm "boinc_bb7752aa79a5ff69" --type headless Output: Waiting for VM "boinc_bb7752aa79a5ff69" to power on... VBoxManage.exe: error: The virtual machine 'boinc_bb7752aa79a5ff69' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code -1073741819 (0xc0000005) VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine 2022-06-28 10:54:08 (153184): VM failed to start. 2022-06-28 10:54:08 (153184): Could not start 2022-06-28 10:54:08 (153184): ERROR: VM failed to start And because the tasks fail straight away these hosts rapidly fail many tasks in succession so we were getting around 98% failure rate for the new version.
23) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS vbox v2.01 (Message 46957) Posted 28 Jun 2022 by David Cameron Post: It seems this version is causing many failures, so I have reverted back to v2.00 while we debug the problems.
24) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS vbox v2.01 (Message 46924) Posted 27 Jun 2022 by David Cameron Post: Hi all, We have just release a new virtualbox version of the ATLAS app, v2.01. The most significant change is the use of a new version of vboxwrapper which enables multiattach mode. In short this means there is no need to make a copy of the large vdi image file at the start of each task so tasks will start quicker. For more technical details see the GitHub issue. As always let us know if you see any issues. David
25) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS badges (Message 46918) Posted 22 Jun 2022 by David Cameron Post: Good point, however the main problem is we'd have to discover new particles or build new parts of ATLAS to make new badges :) But maybe we can think of other things to extend the scale. Since the link to the badges explanation at the top of this thread is out of date, here is the right one: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/badges.php
26) Message boards : Number crunching : CentOS9 (Message 46555) Posted 30 Mar 2022 by David Cameron Post: Please see the following page for official CERN information on CentOS versions: https://linux.web.cern.ch/centos/ Many software packages including CVMFS are not yet ready for CentOS9 but support for CVMFS is planned soon.
27) Message boards : ATLAS application : Apptainer vs Singularity (Message 46548) Posted 29 Mar 2022 by David Cameron Post: Apptainer is also available in the ATLAS CVMFS area at /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/containers/sw/apptainer/x86_64-el7/current/bin/apptainer At the moment the functionality is identical to Singularity but it may diverge at some point. In the future ATLAS tasks will all have to switch to Apptainer instead of Singularity, so I will update the ATLAS scripts to be able to use both, then at a later date Singluarity will be phased out.
28) Message boards : ATLAS application : queue is empty (Message 46268) Posted 17 Feb 2022 by David Cameron Post: We had a problem with the system submitting ATLAS tasks which was fixed this morning. Everything looks to be back to normal now.
29) Message boards : ATLAS application : Guide to Getting Quickly Started Running Native ATLAS (Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2) (Message 46106) Posted 24 Jan 2022 by David Cameron Post: Hi all, Firstly, thank you Brummig for your excellent and helpful instructions. As you and others have said, it is unfortunate that BOINC forums do not allow editing previous posts. But in an attempt to provide clearer information on the CVMFS configuration I have created a new sticky post with what I think is the most appropriate default.local content. Please let me know if anyone sees anything that should be corrected there, as an admin I do have the rights to edit old posts so I can keep this one up to date if anything changes in the future.
30) Message boards : ATLAS application : CVMFS configuration file for ATLAS native (Message 46105) Posted 24 Jan 2022 by David Cameron Post: The purpose of this post is to keep an up to date minimal default CVMFS configuration file that works out of the box and is suitable for most users when starting out with ATLAS native tasks. The following content goes into /etc/cvmfs/default.local CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=atlas.cern.ch,atlas-condb.cern.ch,grid.cern.ch CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY="auto;DIRECT" CVMFS_USE_CDN=yes If you are running ATLAS on more than a handful of hosts you should consider setting up your own Squid caching server - see some helpful information here. If you already have CVMFS set up to run ATLAS or other similar software (for example on grid worker nodes), there is no need to modify any existing configuration for ATLAS@Home jobs.
31) Message boards : ATLAS application : Best wishes for 2022 (Message 45925) Posted 22 Dec 2021 by David Cameron Post: 2021 has been another strange and challenging year, but thanks to you all the ATLAS experiment has been able to continue to produce more groundbreaking physics results. This year you simulated a total of 3 billion events! At 200 events per WU that's 15 million WU crunched. To put this into perspective, the total events simulated by all our worldwide computing resources was around 24 billion, so the contribution through LHC@Home is a really significant part of this. Up to now all the physics analysis done using simulated data was focussed on "Run 2" of the LHC, when the experiment collected data between 2015 and 2018. Next year the LHC accelerator will restart, smashing protons together at an even higher energy than before, and an upgraded ATLAS detector will collect data for the next 3 or 4 years of "Run 3". This requires generating new simulated data with software that was radically improved for processing Run 3 data - you can read more about these improvements here. We hope to start running this new software version here next year, and the most noticeable benefit will be the significant reduction in memory required, which we know has always caused problems for some of you. In the meantime we wish you all the best for the holiday season and for 2022! David for the ATLAS team
32) Message boards : ATLAS application : Bad WUs? (Message 45911) Posted 21 Dec 2021 by David Cameron Post: The question was coming from David, so we have to wait for a answer from the Atlas-Team. There were some issues with central databases at CERN around the time the problems were being reported, so that could have been the cause of the stuck or failing WU. However I see that the vboxwrapper we use is from 2017(!) and should be updated. I have updated the ATLAS app on the LHC-dev project to use the latest version so please give it a try if you have an account there. If it looks good I will update it here, but probably not before the new year.
33) Message boards : ATLAS application : Bad WUs? (Message 45829) Posted 8 Dec 2021 by David Cameron Post: I am checking but nothing changed as far as I can see in the last few days in the set up of ATLAS tasks. My own native tasks seem to run ok. Could there be some Windows/Vbox update causing the problems? I can update the vboxwrapper version used by ATLAS if someone confirms that this fixes the problems.
34) Message boards : ATLAS application : Bad WUs? (Message 45552) Posted 26 Oct 2021 by David Cameron Post: There was a clean up this morning of some “legacy” files on cvmfs, and it turns out those were not legacy at all but used by most atlas tasks. This has just been rolled back but it may take a little while to propagate to cvmfs clients. Sorry for this unforeseen mess.
35) Message boards : ATLAS application : Tasks download 1.9 GB EVNT files (Message 45469) Posted 19 Oct 2021 by David Cameron Post: Hi all, It seems this batch with the very large input files is a one-off caused by a misconfiguration on the ATLAS side. Apologies if it is causing problems and hopefully the next batches should be back to normal.
36) Message boards : ATLAS application : Creation of container failed (Message 45272) Posted 30 Aug 2021 by David Cameron Post: Hi all, I recently switched one of my CentOS 7 machines to use Singularity from CVMFS and got the same problem described in this thread: FATAL: container creation failed: hook function for tag prelayer returns error: failed to create /var/lib/condor directory: mkdir /var/lib/condor: permission denied I am running the boinc client via systemd in /var/lib/boinc and it seems the issue comes from mounting the whole /var directory into the container. I worked around the problem by moving the BOINC data dir to /home/boinc as described here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=13919 However those instructions didn't work exactly out of the box, I had to set ProtectHome=false to allow access to /home and add the new dir to ReadWritePaths. My working settings are # /etc/systemd/system/boinc-client.service.d/override.conf [Service] ProtectHome=false BindPaths=/home/boinc WorkingDirectory=/home/boinc ReadWritePaths=-/etc/boinc-client /home/boinc
37) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS native version 2.87 (Message 45267) Posted 27 Aug 2021 by David Cameron Post: May be the cleaning lady/guy pulled the wrong plug yesterday. Actually it was a planned power test which went slightly wrong... I think I found the other host and restarted the services there.
38) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS native version 2.87 (Message 45264) Posted 26 Aug 2021 by David Cameron Post: Thanks for pointing this out. Hopefully the power outage this afternoon in the CERN data centre took care of restarting the other machine.
39) Message boards : ATLAS application : ATLAS native version 2.87 (Message 45242) Posted 23 Aug 2021 by David Cameron Post: Hi all, We just released native version 2.87. This version uses an "unpacked" Singularity image file instead of a sif file. This means tasks start quicker because there is no need to unpack the image (which can take up to a minute), and also there is no longer any need to install squashfs-tools, which was only used for this unpacking step. As usual let us know if there are any problems! (in case you need to debug any problems, the image changed from /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/containers/images/singularity/x86_64-centos7.img to /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/containers/fs/singularity/x86_64-centos7)
40) Message boards : ATLAS application : queue is empty (Message 45130) Posted 16 Jul 2021 by David Cameron Post: Atlas have only 2 Tasks in the queue shown: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/server_status.php Once again no new tasks. still no tasks available. Major disruption somewhere there ? We have had a few issues this week on the ATLAS side which have affected submission of tasks here, but there should be some new tasks coming in now.

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