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Using the MINOS Linux Cluster

MINOS has a Linux cluster that consists of 25 nodes each with two 3GHz CPUs and 4 Gbytes of memory. The cluster is designed for interactive use such as code development, debugging, running ROOT sessions. If you want to run long batch jobs on lots of data then you should be using the condor or lsf batch systems.

Nodes Names

The node names are minos01 - minos25.

Getting an account

You can apply for an account by filling out this form .

Logging in

There are 25 nodes in the cluster. We hope to eventually have some load balancing software that allows you to login to an alias and be transferred to the least loaded machine. Unfortunately we have been unable to make this work at the present time. So users will have to look at the load and choose a machine that is least busy. You can look at the Ganglia Monitoring (cluster only) to see the load on the nodes. As always you should use ssh to login.

Home areas

Your home area is your FNALU AFS home area. So any work you do on the cluster can also be accessed from the FNALU interactive and batch nodes as well as your desktop if you have the AFS client installed.

MINOS Offline Software

The MINOS offline software ia available via AFS. There are instructions available for setting up the FNAL base release.

Data disks

Each machine has a 250 GBytes disk as a local scratch disk. This is mounted as /local/scratchxx where xx=01,02,..,12. If you setup minossoft then $SCRATCH will point to this disk on any of the nodes. These disks are designed for temporary data storage and will be purged monthly. Please create a directory for yourself.
All the existing AFS data space is available and is located at /afs/fnal.gov/files/data/minos. An environmental symbol $MINOS_DATA is available if you have setup minossoft. We will be adding more AFS space shortly.

Data access

All nodes have access to /pnfs/minos. Instructions for accessing data are available here. Data access via SAM will be coming soon. Watch this space.

Interactive vs. Batch use

These nodes are for general MINOS use, both for development of code and analysis processing. Heavy duty processing should be done using either the condor or lsf batch systems to ensure a fair share distribution of the resources. Interactive use should be restricted primarily to development efforts (e.g. compiling and running under the debugger) and very short jobs. Running multiple interactive jobs on one or more machines is unacceptable unless pre-approved.

Users should try to avoid nodes that have predefined purposes as described here.

Admin support

For sysadmin issues please send mail to minos-admin@fnal.gov.


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