Introduction
We are developing a cluster for local ATLAS computing using the TACC Alamo site of FutureGrid to boot virtual machines.
Local Personnel: Crystal Riley
VM configuration
Our virtual machines are CentOS 5.7 instances configured with CVMFS for importing the ATLAS software stack from CERN. They also boot individual instances of the Condor job scheduling system. They will also boot Squid HTTP caching servers, which help reduce network traffic required for CVMFS and for database access using the Frontier system.
Booting a VM on Nimbus with scratch disk
We need to use tools other than the standard cloud-client.sh provided by Nimbus. We use a slightly modified vm-helpers. Untar the file vm-helpers.tgz in your nimbus-cloud-client directory (it will dump four files into bin/). Now you can run e.g.
cd nimbus-cloud-client-21 grid-proxy-init -cert conf/usercert.pem -key conf/userkey.pem bin/vm-run --cloud master1.futuregrid.tacc.utexas.edu:8443 --image "cumulus://master1.futuregrid.tacc.utexas.edu:8888/Repo/VMS/71a4ea3e-07e4-11e2-a3b7-02215ecdcdaf/centos-5.7-x64-clusterbase.kvm" --blank-space 500000
which will give you a 500 GB scratch space. Our images will mount this under /scratch.
Building Image Using Boxgrinder
Ensure that Boxgrinder is present on the VM which you are building from. If this is a temporary image, it is likely you will need to copy over or git conf files and the appliance definition (.appl). Boxgrinder can be run by:boxgrinder-build definition.appl -d local
Boxgrinder options include:
?-f #Remove previous build for this image --os-config format:qcow2 #Build image with qcow2 disk -p #Specify location style (VMware, KVM, Player, etc..) -d local #Deliver to local directory --debug #Prints debug info while building --trace #Print trace info while building
Getting started with Bosco
[... in progress...] Bosco is a job submission manager designed to manage job submissions across different resources. It is needed to submit jobs from local machines to openstack.
Make sure you have an account on our local machine atlas.its.utexas.edu.
ssh atlas.its.utexas.edu curl -o bosco_quickstart.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/condor/bosco/1.2/bosco_quickstart.tar.gz tar xvzf ./bosco_quickstart.tar.gz ./bosco_quickstart
this will ask you if you would like to install. Select y and continue.