AnalysisAtNikhef

Running analyses at Nikhef

General information

This is an index of Technical/computing info for the ALICE group

If you want to launch your analysis at the batch farm of Nikhef and you try to connect outside the Nikhef domain then first connect to the login server

. ssh <username>@login.nikhef.nl

Please note that you should never try to run anything on this machine (e.g. not even using a browser), since this is the entry point for everybody to the Nikhef domain. For light things (e.g. browsing a web page, downloading a paper etc) connect to one of the desktops of our group:

. vesdre, romanche, hamme, blavet, mella, mulde, olona, sacco, luhe

In case you need to run some analysis interactively that needs to access data stored on the common disk then you need to connect on one of the interactive nodes:

. stbc-i1, stbc-i2, stbc-i4

ALICE software and how to access it

The ALICE specific software is installed centrally and is available for usage. We try to keep the three latest physics tags installed. We install one physics tag per week, if a new tag is needed please send a mail to Panos.Christakoglou@nikhef.nl, indicating the tag you need. Please note that the physics tags which are more than three weeks old are removed.

The ALICE installation has recently been moved to the new AliBuild system! To take advantage of the new environment and access the software please add the following line to your bashrc (or whichever shell script you use):

. export ALICE_WORK_DIR=/project/alice/aliBuild/
. export PATH=$PATH:$ALICE_WORK_DIR:$ALICE_WORK_DIR/alibuild:

To list the modules installed type:

. alienv q aliphysics

To load the ALICE environment on your Nikhef node, use:

. alienv enter AliPhysics/latest-vAN-20160601

by obviously replacing the physics tag with the one you want to use

Running analyses on the Stoomboot cluster

We have two local computer clusters:

• Stoomboot at Nikhef
• Quark at Utrecht University. You need a UU computing (Solis) account for this one. Some basic instructions are here.

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