Get a Grid Certificate

In order to use grid resources, you'll first need to acquire a personal grid certificate. Follow these instructions.

Join a Virtual Organization

After obtaining a grid certificate, you'll need to become a member of a virtual organization (VO), or to add your grid certificate to the membership list on a VOMS (Virtual Organization Management System) server. Follow these instructions.

Use Grid Resources

The following steps are prerequisites to submitting grid jobs:

  1. Install your grid certificate in your home directory and web browser. Follow these instructions.

  2. Establish a grid environment, which is usually specific to your site or experiment. For example, ATLAS users need to export grid-specific environment variables and run a setup script; see the ATLAS TWiki, or the following commands may suffice:

    # set your local ATLAS environment:
export ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE="/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/ATLASLocalRootBase"
alias setupATLAS="source ${ATLAS_LOCAL_ROOT_BASE}/user/atlasLocalSetup.sh"
# Adding the `-3` flag to `setupATLAS` sets up in a newer Python v3 environment. 
# To use the older Python 2 environment, omit the `-3` flag:
setupATLAS -3
# Set up your DDM environment:
export RUCIO_HOME="/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/repo/sw/ddm/rucio-clients/latest"
export RUCIO_AUTH_TYPE="x509_proxy"
# Export your CERN user name as your DDM nickname:
export RUCIO_ACCOUNT="nickname"
# Set up a Rucio client:
lsetup rucio
# or use the older Rucio alias instead: localSetupRucioClients

  3. Create a VOMS proxy. See the official VOMS client documentation, or use the voms-proxy-init command:

    voms-proxy-init --voms=atlas -hours 240

User Information

Some basic BNL-specific grid information can be found here.

BNL's OSG gatekeepers are:

  • gridgk01.racf.bnl.gov
  • gridgk02.racf.bnl.gov

These gatekeepers can be used to submit batch jobs to the grid.

In order to log into the gatekeepers and use grid client software, obtain a BNL and SDCC computing account.

Troubleshooting

If access to one or more grid resources fails after setting up a grid environment, enter the following commands and follow the interactive prompts to check your setup, permissions, files, and other access factors:

setupATLAS -3 # should have already done this previously
diagnostics
gridCert

Tutorials