Summary PHYSGI01 Meeting 6/20/94

B. Gibbard

Next Meeting:

The next meeting will be Monday, June 27, 11:30 - 12:00, in the Room 2-160.

Production User Input for PHYSGI01:

This week's meeting was very lightly attended by users presumably indicating a lack of pressing concerns related to system resource sharing and general system operations.
During the past week the major large scale CPU intensive user was E818 (Hackenburg et al). E850 (Gushue et al.) have moved their CPU activity to the Challenge server in the Chemistry Dept and are primaily relying on PHYSGI as a disk server. Production CPU usage by other users has been moderate and intermittent.
Tape activity on PHYSGI was high with substantial contention between users. A modified version of TAPMAN, which supports the deallocation of empty tape drives by any user, was put into service and seems to work as specified.
Indications are that similar relatively light CPU usage with heavy tape and disk usage is likely for the coming week.

All experiments which anticipate running more than an single occasional production job during a given week are required to attend the scheduling meeting. If that is not possible they should notify Bruce Gibbard (gibbard@bnl.gov) and Tom Throwe (throwe@rsgi02.rhic.gov) of their needs by Email prior to the Monday 11:30 meeting.

Plan for week beginning 6/20/94:

The currently established rules will remain in effect for the following week. These rules are intended to give a modest advantage to experiments involved in the current AGS run.

A production process is defined as a process which would accrue an hour or more of CPU time in 8 hours of uncontended running.
Each experiment is allowed to run up to 6 concurrent "production" process, only one of which may be run at full priority, (100).
Experiments not actively engaged in the current AGS run must nice all additional "production" process to 4 (104).
Experiments which are actively engaged in the current AGS run may nice one additional "production" process to 2 (102) but are required to nice "production" processes beyond the first two to 4 (104).
Extended use of a tape drive is defined as use which extends for more than 1 hour.
In the presences of demand by other experiments for tape drives, no experiment should make extended use of more than 2 tape drives.
Experiments not actively engaged in the current run should limit their extend use, in the presence of demand by other experiments, to 1 tape drive.

User1 is approaching 90% full so it is likely that the system will be taken down for a short period some time this week to add an additional disk to the user1 volume set.

Other issues:

There have been numerous reports of network problems associated with the use of PHYSGI01 as well as other Physics Department machines resently. CCD believes that Charybdis, the router serving Physics, is heavily overloaded. Parts are on order to upgrade it and it is hoped that this near future upgrade will substantially relieve these recently observed problems.

Users of PHYSGI01 are still strongly encourage to set a mail forward from their working account on PHYSGI01 to an account on a machine where they frequently check their mail so that they can be easily contacted.