Stoomboot

What is stoomboot

Stoomboot is a batch farm for local use at NIKHEF. It is in principle open to all NIKHEF users, but a login account does not give automatic access to stoomboot. Contact helpdesk@nikhef.nl to gain access

Hardware

Stoomboot consists of 16 nodes (stbc-01 through stbc-16) that are each a equipped with dual quad-core Intel Xeon E5335 2.0 Ghz processors and 16 Gb of memory. The total number of cores is 128.

Software & disk access

All stoomboot nodes run Scientific Linux 4.7. All NFS mountable disks at NIKHEF are visible (/project/* and /data/*). Stoomboot does not run AFS so no AFS directories including /afs/cern.ch are not visible.

How to use stoomboot

Submitting batch jobs

Stoomboot is a batch-only facilities and jobs can be submitted through the PBS qsub command

unix> qsub test.sh
9714.allier.nikhef.nl

The argument passed to qsub is a script that will be executed in your home directory. The returned string is the job identifier and can be used to look up the status of the job, or to manipulate it later.

The qstat command shows the stats of all your jobs. Status code 'C' indicates completed, 'R' indicates running and 'Q' indicates queued.

unix> qstat
Job id              Name             User            Time Use S Queue
------------------- ---------------- --------------- -------- - -----
9714.allier         test.sh          verkerke        00:00:00 C test

Appears in file <jobname>.o<number>, e.g. test.sh.o9714 in example of previous page