CentOS 7 Deployment in the US cloud

Wednesday 26 Jul 2017, 13:00 → 14:00 US/Eastern

Topic: Move the US facility toward CentOS 7 - a modern OS which supports the container technology, for backward compatibility, and to run a wide range of applications.

Though linked to container technology, this meeting will focus on CentOS 7 deployment. Would like:

• Sites to give us thoughts on their plans and potential issues 
• What docs (from ADC or by ourselves) do we need to help sites
• Timeline (if possible)

From Alessandra Forti:

ATLAS software is supported on CentOS7 both SL6 and CentOS7 releases can run even without containers since January 2017 [1]. SL5 releases will be instead phased out.

The OSG middleware was supported already last year and US sites shouldn't have any problem upgrading if they want to.

The EGI middleware was what kept EGI sites behind instead but should finally be available from the 31st of July 2017 in the UMD-4.5 release. 

Sites that want to move should follow the instruction here [2]. 

If sites want to move to containers that is possible too (some sites are using them already) but the work and instructions for that are less well defined for the moment and will take few months.

Let me know if you have any questions.

cheers
alessandra

[1] https://indico.cern.ch/event/579473/contributions/2429454/attachments/1398035/2132472/20160524_ADC_weekly_centos7.pdf
[2] https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasComputing/CentOS7Readiness

 

13:00 → 13:45 Route Table Discussion

Attendees: Alessandra, Bob, Horst, Xin, Saul, Wei

ADC CentOS 7 readiness page:

https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasComputing/CentOS7Readiness

Suggest that each site setup a dedicated s-core Panda Queue XXX_SL7 to test their setup.

Sites will have two options: Run directly on CentOS7 host, or via Singularity.

For sites that wants to run Singularity, there are also two options:

1. Encapsulate job payload in Singularity image (by batch), can use either Singularity 2.2.1 or 2.3.x. BNL, MWT2 and NET2 prefers this approach 
2. Have pilot starts Singularity as needed (https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/viewauth/AtlasComputing/ContainersInUScloud). Should use Singularity 2.2.1 for now, which is the common denominator. AGLT2 and OU will take this route. 

ADC is OK with both approach, and prefer 2.

Time frame to start deploying CentOS7 on batch nodes:

• BNL: looking at the end of September
• AGLT2: Sep/Oct
• MWT2:
• NET2: using old version of GPFS. No license for new GPFS that is required to run on CentOS7. Looking at either buy license or switch to CEPH based storage. Both take long time.
• SWT2-OU: Done 12 months ago.
• SWT2-UTA:
• SLAC: unknown. Switching to CentOS7 is tired to switching of unix configuration management system (toward CHEF).

Will create a twiki to help US sites to exchange info, with a link point to the ADC twiki (above)