GROW is a tier 3 computer cluster which is hosted by the University of Iowa - High Energy Physics Group. It is going to be connected to the Open Science Grid (OSG) and is affiliated with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) virtual organization (VO). The cluster is managed via Rocks software and uses Scientific Linux 5.4 64 bit on all Rocks nodes. Our storage is provided by a 72 TB storage server which uses a RAID 6 array.

Our application was accepted to take part in the Dynamic Network System (DYNES). We are awaiting testing on the equipment.

• PDF Establishing a Compact Muon Solenoid Grid-based Tier-2 National Computing Center and NSF Shared Cyberinfrastructure Tier-2C Program at the University of Iowa

• PDF DYNES End-site Application

• PDF NSF MRI Acknowledgement

If you are using our wiki pages there are a few things that you should pay attention to before continuing. We have divided up the content into different objects:

Throughout our wiki pages there are many places where we have posted the commands actually used for certain tasks. Shell commands are encapsulated in a box as shown below with the prompt icon and a typical shell color scheme of black background and gree font-color. These are show as either:

Root commands have a red border.

[root@login-0-0 ~]# cp test.txt ../bin

All other user commands have a green border. Often the user name is just user. You will have to replace the username if copying the commands with an actual username in most situations.

[user@highenergy ~]$ ls -al
drwxr-xr-x  5 root     root           0 Jul  9 12:56 ..
-rw——-  1 user user   19997 Jul  7 13:08 .bash_history
-rw-r–r–  1 user user      33 Jun 21  2011 .bash_logout
-rw-r–r–  1 user user     238 Jun 16 16:33 .bash_profile
-rw-r–r–  1 user user     591 Jun 27 15:38 .bashrc

Information that may be relevent to the user.

Information that is likely to be important to the user.

Advise for the user. These may not be necessary for the user but helpful.

Make sure to read carefully through the directions before performing any actions or continuing further.

View the GROW main web site. There are links on this page to Rocks documentation, user guides, cluster management and monitoring.
http://grow-prod.its.uiowa.edu/wordpress/.

http://grow-prod.its.uiowa.edu/ganglia/.

• GROW Diagram: A diagram of our rack, servers, etc…
• GROW Hardware: A list of all our hardware
• Node Roles: A list of Rocks nodes and how they are implemented on our cluster.
• Network Information: Network information for all of our nodes.
• User Information: How users can get an account, login, run jobs …etc.
• Administration Procedures & Information: GROW Administrator Information
• Administration Procedures: General procedures for GROW.
• System Log: A log to keep track of system changes, updates, installs…etc.

Here is our guide to installing a Tier 3 Rocks cluster. This guide serves two purposes: First as documentation for ourselves on how our cluster was put together, and second as a guide for others who wish to build a Rocks cluster. Most of this guide uses hardware names, info, and configurations for our cluster so please be sure to adjust for your configuration.

Head Node: Installing the Rocks on the head node, and configuration

Compute Node(s): Installing Rocks compute nodes.

Login Node(s): Modifying and installing Rocks login appliances/nodes

Grid Node(s): Creating and installing grid appliances/nodes.

Squid Web Proxy Setup: How to install Squid web proxy software.

Kerberos Setup: How to install Kerberos network authentication software

Condor Setup: How to install condor HTC software.

OSG Setup: Certificate Authority, OSG software stack installation.

OSG Setup (rpm): New OSG software stack rpm based installation.

Certificates: Install and Renew Site Certificates.

CMSSW: CMS Software Stack Installation.

Disk Quotas: Setting up Disk Quotas.

Dynes Equipment: Setting up Dynes Equipment

• compute-0-6 has a problem with the first hard disk slot (on the left). While trying to format it claimed there was not enough room to store the /boot section. The hard disk was originally in the 2nd slot and I moved it over. After running into the=is problem I moved the disk back to the 2nd slot.
• compute-0-9 always needs to press F12 when trying to install as a compute node. I set the BIOS to network as top boot priority but it still tries to boot off the hard disk.
• To set up gateway for nodes. Login in to each public node, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 add variable GATEWAY=128.255.88.1

This Dokuwiki page is maintained by:
Daniel Squires
University of Iowa
Department of Computer Science
Email: daniel-squires@uiowa.edu