Local Computing

All new users will have access to a home directory on the ppe system, of the form /afs/phas.gla.ac.uk/user/"u"/"username".

Please contact PPE IT Support for more details about local user accounts.

Below are instructions on setting up locally, so that one might run an Athena job from a Glasgow desktop.

Athena Releases at Glasgow

ATLAS Local Root Base

Glasgow PPE machines have CVMFS (CERN Virtual Machine File System) installed on them, which allows very efficient access to all current ATLAS releases. Access to releases (and other useful ATLAS software) is done with the setupATLAS command, itself hosted on CVMFS. To use setupATLAS do this (bash, ksh, zsh):

export ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE=/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/ATLASLocalRootBase
alias setupATLAS='source ${ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE}/user/atlasLocalSetup.sh'

or this (csh, tcsh):

setenv ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/ATLASLocalRootBase
alias setupATLAS 'source ${ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE}/user/atlasLocalSetup.csh'

(Usually it's best to add these lines to your shell's startup scipts, e.g., .bashrc.)

Then run setupATLAS:

ppepc145:~$ setupATLAS
...Type localSetupAGIS to setup AGIS
...Type localSetupDQ2Client to use DQ2 Client
...Type localSetupEmi to use emi
...Type localSetupFAX to use FAX
...Type localSetupGanga to use Ganga
...Type localSetupGcc to use alternate gcc
...Type localSetupMana to setup mana
...Type localSetupPacman to use Pacman
...Type localSetupPandaClient to use Panda Client
...Type localSetupPyAMI to setup pyAMI
...Type localSetupPoD to setup Proof-on-Demand
...Type localSetupROOT to setup (standalone) ROOT
...Type localSetupRucio to setup Rucio
...Type localSetupXRootD to setup XRootD
...Type showVersions to show versions of installed software
...Type asetup to setup a release (changeASetup to change asetup version)
...Type rcSetup to setup an ASG release (changeRCSetup to change rcSetup ver.)
...Type diagnostics for diagnostic tools
...Type helpMe for more help
...Type printMenu to show this menu

Please see ATLASLocalRootBase documentation for more information.

asetup

After setting up ATLAS Local Root Base, simply use the usual asetup command to setup your desired athena release, e.g.,

ppepc145:~/dev/trk$ asetup 19.1.1.5,here
AtlasProduction/19.1.1.5 with platform x86_64-slc6-gcc47-opt
at /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/sw/software/x86_64-slc6-gcc47-opt/19.1.1
Test area: /afs/phas.gla.ac.uk/user/g/graeme/dev/trk

See the ATLAS twiki for complete asetup documentation. Note that if you need to use very old or very new releases you may need some extra arguments to select the correct build, e.g., on an SL6 machine use an SL5 release like this: asetup 17.2.14.3,slc5

Package Checkout

Checking out packages from ATLAS SVN at CERN should work without problems. However, there are a few tricks to avoid needing to type your password all the time, in particular you need to setup your ~/.ssh/config file with the following configuration for svn.cern.ch:

Host svn.cern.ch svn
GSSAPIAuthentication yes
GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
Protocol 2
ForwardX11 no
User graemes  # <--- Replace with your CERN AFS username, if it's different from your PPE unix account name

You will need to add your ssh public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on lxplus at CERN.

You should now be able to use cmt co path/package or pkgco.py package and not be prompted for a password (personally, I like pkgco.py better as there is no need to specify the path to the package; see this documentation for the gory details).

-- Graeme Stewart - 2014-01-14