Summary PHYSGI Meeting 7/25/94

B. Gibbard

Next Meeting:

The next meeting will be Monday, August 1, 11:30 - 12:00, in Rm 2-160.

Production User Input for PHYSGI01:

E881 & E850 were represented at this week's meeting.
During the past week the major CPU intensive user was E881 (Hackenburg et al). Production CPU usage by other users has been small and intermittent. There continues to be substantial tape copying activity on PHYSGI01.
E850 expects to begin production processing on PHYSGI03 this week, see "Other Issues", Item 4, below.
E881 expects to continue its use of PHYSGI01 and may extend its usage to PHYSGI03. It was estimated that E881 is approximately 3/4 done with its data analysis pass.

All experiments which anticipate running more than an single occasional production job during a given week should 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 7/18/94:

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 currently allowed to run up to 6 concurrent "production" process per computer, 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.

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.
The interaction of private multi-cast tunnels with MBone tunnels has the potential for substantially increasing network traffic. In the absence of an important need for such tunnels, their use is discouraged on subnets in the Physics Department.
At this time there are no known problems with the 8mm tape stackers.
The new challenge machine intended to replace PHYSGI01 is now in operation as PHYSGI03. Its function will remain that of a simple Ethernet connected compute server until the end of the AGS run. Some time not long after the end of the run it will be equipped with the PHYSGI01 peripherals and will replace PHYSGI01. It currently mounts the PHYSGI01 file system and all of the PHYSGI01 accounts are valid on it. Groups who want to have it mount private file systems which are currently mounted by PHYSGI01 should change export permissions appropriately and notify Tom Nepsee by Email of this desire.

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.