Summary PHYSGI Meeting 10/10/94

T. Throwe

Next Meeting:

The next meeting will be Monday, October 17, 11:30 - 12:00, in Rm. 2-160.

Production User Input for PHYSGI01:

Representatives from E852 and E891 were present at this week's meeting.
E852 is ready to begin production activity on data collected during the recent AGS run. They expect the demand for time on PHYSGI01 to continue into the foreseeable future.
E891 will be getting beam next week (perhaps as early as the weekend of the 15th) and expect to be running two jobs on PHYSGI01 after the usual initial startup problems. They do not expect to have any demands for time on PHYSGI01 for the present week.
The representative from E891 (Al Saulys) feels that their present disk allocation will be adequate.

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 10/10/94:

The following are the basic rules established to control the use of resources on PHYSGI01. With the conclusion of the AGS run these rules have been simplified somewhat.

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" processes. Only one of these 6 processes may be run at full priority, (100).
All "production" processes beyond the first are to be niced to 2 (102). This allows for the possibility of assigning medium priority jobs, niced to 1 (101), at some point in the future.
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.
The tape stackers represent a relatively scarce resource. It is hoped that negotiation between users will result in mutually acceptable sharing. If users find that not to be the case, rules will be established to guarantee sharing which is as equitable as possible, consistent with the overall mission of the PHYSGI computing system.

Other issues:

As stated in the 8/8/94 summary, there were numerous reports of network problems and Charybdis, the router serving Physics, was scheduled for an upgrade. The upgrade of Charybdis has occurred. Please report any current network problems to your network contact person.
The interaction of private multi-cast tunnels with MBone (desk top video conferencing) 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.

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.