CernVM Workshop 2024

Europe/Zurich
500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

CERN

1211 Geneva 23
400
Show room on map
Valentin Volkl (CERN)
Description

The CernVM Users Workshop is held from 16 to 18 September 2024 at CERN, Geneva.

 

 

The CernVM 2024 workshop follows the previous editions held at Nikhef in 2022, virtually in February 2021, at CERN in June 2019, at CERN in January 2018, at RAL (UK) in June 2016 and at CERN in March 2015.

As usual, the workshop aims to bring together users and developers to discuss the current status of the CernVM ecosystem and the future directions, with a fresh look onto the landscape of cloud technology and software delivery.

This is planned as an in-person event with the possibility of joining remotely. If you plan to attend, either in-person or remotely, please register.

We are happy to welcome invited guest speakers from the industry on selected technology topics:

  • Bernd Schubert (DDN), Maintainer of libFUSE
  • Miklos Szeredi, Maintainer of FUSE
  • Stephane Cance, Varnish Software
  • Walid Boudebouda, Varnish Software
  • Matt Harvey, JumpTrading

 

Attending the event in-person is free but for logistical reasons we would like to know how many people will be there. Let us know if you wish to change your registration.

For remote participants: please register and find the Zoom details. You are also welcome to join us on Mattermost during the workshop.

For questions or comments, please contact us at cernvm-workshop@cern.ch.

 

Videoconference
CernVM Workshop 2024
Zoom Meeting ID
69462048757
Host
Valentin Volkl
Useful links
Join via phone
Zoom URL
Registration
Register for the CernVM Workshop
    • 1
      CernVM-FS Hacking Session Restaurant 2

      Restaurant 2

      CERN

      On-site session for discussions and coding. The core team will be present and participants are welcome to join us at the venue.

      Speakers: Jakob Blomer (CERN), Laura Promberger (CERN), Valentin Volkl (CERN)
    • 12:00
      Lunch 500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      CERN

      1211 Geneva 23
      400
      Show room on map
    • Monday afternoon: CERN team presentations 31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

      31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

      CERN

      105
      Show room on map
      Convener: Dave Dykstra (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))
      • 2
        Welcome and Practicalities
        Speaker: Valentin Volkl (CERN)
      • 3
        Workshop Introduction
        Speakers: Gerardo Ganis (CERN), Predrag Buncic (CERN)
      • 4
        CernVM-FS at 15: technological retrospective
        Speaker: Jakob Blomer (CERN)
      • 5
        CernVM-FS: Status and Plans
        Speaker: Valentin Volkl (CERN)
      • 15:30
        Coffea Break
      • 6
        Zstd: A new compression algorithm for CVMFS
        Speaker: Laura Promberger (CERN)
      • 7
        New overlayfs features in cvmfs_server; Fuse-t on MacOS
        Speaker: Yurii Bielikov (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (UA))
      • 8
        Efficient and fast container execution using image snapshotters

        A large fraction of computing workloads in high-energy and nuclear physics is executed using software containers. For physics analysis use, such container images often have sizes of several gigabytes. Executing a large number of such jobs in parallel on different compute nodes efficiently, demands the availability and use of caching mechanisms and image loading techniques to prevent network saturation and significantly reduce startup time. Using the industry-standard containerd container runtime for pulling and running containers, enables the use of various so-called snapshotter plugins that “lazily” load container images. We present a quantitative comparison of the performance of the CVMFS, SOCI, and Stargz snapshotter plugins. Furthermore, we also evaluate the user-friendliness of such approaches and discuss how such seamlessly containerised workloads contribute to the reusability and reproducibility of physics analyses.

        Speaker: Max Fatouros (Paul Scherrer Institute (CH))
      • 9
        Optimizing CERN SFT Nightlies Publication through Parallelized CVMFS Gateway Installation

        The EP-SFT Stacks team provides LCG software stack nightly builds for 50 different combinations of STACK and PLATFORM.
        Historically, the publication of nightlies on CVMFS utilized a single machine, resulting in extended processing times that lasted until the end of the working day. To speed up the publication, and enable the distribution of a larger set of platforms every day, the LCG stack publication was moved to distributing the CVMFS gateway publication across multiple machines, thus reducing the CVMFS installation bottleneck.
        Because we are constrained by the requirement of keeping the historic file system hierarchy, not all parts of the publication can be parallelized.
        This talk will describe the development of a Jenkins pipeline to parallelize the publication of the LCG software stacks. It will explain how we use the Jenkins locking mechanism in combination with gateway leases to manage parallelization and mitigate potential file system conflicts. It will show in detail which parts of our publication stages, such as the installation of packages, remain partially serialized due to their structure in the file system, while other stages, such as the creation and installation of platform-specific views, are now executed in parallel.

        Speaker: Mr Tim Ehmann (CERN EP-SFT)
      • 10
        Containerizing CVMFS publishing
        Speaker: Amal Santosh Thundiyil (CERN)
    • 19:30
      Dinner - Bains des Paquis
    • Tuesday morning: FUSE and Varnish guest speakers 503/1-001 - Council Chamber

      503/1-001 - Council Chamber

      CERN

      162
      Show room on map
      Convener: Jakob Blomer (CERN)
    • 12:00
      Lunch Break - Visits to AD & LEIR 500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      CERN

      1211 Geneva 23
      400
      Show room on map
    • Tuesday afternoon: experiments and sites 6/2-024 - BE Auditorium Meyrin

      6/2-024 - BE Auditorium Meyrin

      CERN

      120
      Show room on map
      Convener: Valentin Volkl (CERN)
      • 15
        CernVM-FS makes software EESSI to use

        /cvmfs/software.eessi.io is the production CernVM-FS repository of the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI, pronounced as "easy", see eessi.io/docs). After several pilot iterations, EESSI has released its first production software stack in the fall of 2023. The growing software stack already includes hundreds of software installations optimised for a variety of CPU microarchitectures (x86_64 and aarch64 CPU families) that are ready to be used by anyone on any (Linux) machine anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes.

        In this talk, we will present the status of EESSI (progress we made since the last CernVM workshop in 2022) and the features we are currently working on. Particularly, we will cover our efforts to automate the building of software for multiple CPU architectures, ongoing work to add support for more CPU architectures (AMD Genoa, Intel Sapphire Rapids and Fujitsu A64FX) and GPUs (NVIDIA and AMD), introduce our growing suite of portable regression tests, describe how we collaborate with software developers (including the recently created dev.eessi.io CernVM-FS repository) as well as experiences we made through training and support activities.

        We will also show the progress for RISC-V CPUs (available via the CernVM-FS repository riscv.eessi.io), work on enabling and fine-tuning EESSI on (Euro)HPC sites and discuss plans for improved monitoring.

        Speaker: Thomas Röblitz
      • 16
        LHCb installations on CVMFS
        Speaker: Ben Couturier (CERN)
      • 14:40
        Coffee Break
      • 17
        CVMFS Stratum 1 Performance Benchmarks
        Speaker: Dave Dykstra (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))
      • 18
        Pelican and the Open Science Data Federation
        Speaker: Brian Paul Bockelman (University of Wisconsin Madison (US))
      • 19
        CVMFS in EUCLID
        Speaker: Pierre Casenove (CNES)
      • 15:55
        Coffee Break
      • 20
        ATLAS Installations on CVMFS
        Speaker: John Steven De Stefano Jr (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US))
      • 21
        New CernVM-FS use cases at CMS

        CernVM-FS remains a central service for the distribution of the CMS Offline Software (CMSSW). Traditional use cases include the distribution of CMSSW releases and container images. It also plays a crucial role in the deployment of Integration Builds (IB) and pull request testing as part of the CMSSW CI/CD workflow.

        In this contribution, we present three new use cases of CernVM-FS for CMS. Firstly, the distribution of gridpacks to accelerate Monte Carlo generation. Gridpacks are pre-computed diagrams distributed in the form of tarballs that are used as lookup files. The CernVM-FS ingest command allows the serving of already-untarred gridpacks, reducing the load of unpacking them on computing sites. Secondly, the use of opportunistic HPC resources using the singcvmfs command in the cvmfsexec package. The CMS Offline infrastructure already makes use of AMD GPUs from the LUMI HPC in Finland, thanks to FUSE pre-mounting. Finally, we are currently building the CMSSW software stack for the RISC-V architecture. To include this new architecture in the CMSSW IBs, deployment to CernVM-FS using emulation on the publisher nodes has been implemented.

        These new use cases at CMS highlight the importance of CernVM-FS in streamlining workflows and improving the performance of the CMS Offline infrastructure.

        Speaker: Andrea Valenzuela Ramirez (CERN)
      • 22
        ALICE installations on CVMFS
        Speaker: Giulio Eulisse (CERN)
      • 23
        CVMFS@GSI

        GSI is and has been operating a cvmfs instance for many years.
        It is used primarily to make prerequisites for physics simulations and analysis of GSI and future FAIR experiments available on our compute cluster.
        These include items such as precompiled executables, Spack packages, as well as Apptainer images.
        The current cvmfs setup at GSI will be outlined in this talk.

        Speaker: Soren Lars Gerald Fleischer (GSI - Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH (DE))
      • 24
        CVMFS-CSI: CVMFS in Kubernetes Deployments at CERN-IT
        Speaker: Jack Charlie Munday
    • 18:30
      CERN 70 Social Event 500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      CERN

      1211 Geneva 23
      400
      Show room on map

      https://community-event.web.cern.ch/

    • Discussion session / Hands-On: Varnish Hands-On / Discussion Session 500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

      CERN

      400
      Show room on map
      Convener: Valentin Volkl (CERN)
      • 25
        Varnish Hands-On
        Speaker: Mr Walid Boudebouda
      • 11:00
        Coffee Break
      • 26
        Discussion session / Hands-On
      • 27
        Workshop Closing
        Speaker: Valentin Volkl (CERN)