NDPF News

At A Glance

• Computing services Nikhef interrupted due to unscheduled power cut
• Storage and general services remain available
• Use other Grid sites to re-schedule work
• For more information, mail grid.support@nikhef.nl
• See http://www.ndpf.info for current status

Moving grid services to new data center

A new data center has been built at Nikhef. The existing grid infrastructure at Nikhef will be moved to this new data center between 10 August and 21 August. During the migration process, grid services will be unavailable.

This large-scale operation will take place in two phases:

1) Moving grid services and network infrastructure (10-14 August 2009)

During this phase, all grid services at site NIKHEF-ELPROD will be unavailable. For grid users this means that the following services cannot be used:

• Computing services (CEs gazon.nikhef.nl and trekker.nikhef.nl);
• Storage services (SE tbn18.nikhef.nl);
• Job submission services (WMS graszode.nikhef.nl, graspol.nikhef.nl, dorsvlegel.nikhef.nl);
• Requesting renewal of grid certificates via the Dutchgrid CA web site will not be possible at 10 and 11 August (requests can be submitted via mail but will not be processed);
• The web sites www.dutchgrid.nl, www.vl-e.nl and poc.vl-e.nl will be unavailable.

2) Moving compute and storage clusters (15-21 August 2009)

In this phase, the computing and storage clusters will be unavailable. Grid users will not be able to:

• Use the computing services (CEs gazon.nikhef.nl and trekker.nikhef.nl);
• Access certain data files via SE tbn18.nikhef.nl.

We advise all users of the grid infrastructure to:

• Request renewal of grid certificates before August 5th (only if the certificate will expire early or mid-August);
• Use the grid computing services at SARA (CE ce.gina.sara.nl)
• Submit grid jobs via the WMS at SARA (WMS wms.grid.sara.nl)
• Plan their work such, that no access is required to data files via storage element tbn18.nikhef.nl, or to copy relevant data elsewhere.

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Past announcements

Grid computing nodes unavailable 24-27 April

During the weekend of 25-26 April, work will be done on the electric systems providing power to the grid computing nodes at Nikhef. Therefore, the grid computing nodes ("worker nodes") at Nikhef's grid facility will be unavailable from Friday April 24, 13:00 until Monday April 27, 10:00.

The facility will stop accepting new jobs from Thursday morning 8:00 (the 23rd), to enable jobs to finish before the shutdown of the nodes.

Stopping resource broker services at NIKHEF-ELPROD

The resource broker services at site NIKHEF-ELPROD will be stopped at 02-February-2009. This affects the RBs bosheks.nikhef.nl, boszwijn.nikhef.nl and the alias rb03.nikhef.nl.

Current users of the resource brokers are advised to start submitting their jobs via the replacing WMS servers as soon as possible, but not later than January 15, 2009. Output sandboxes have to be retrieved before February 2, 2009; after this date they will be deleted.

The WMS hosts at NIKHEF-ELPROD are graszode.nikhef.nl and graspol.nikhef.nl (or use the alias wms03.nikhef.nl).

Removing installation of VL-e PoC release 2

The installation of VL-e PoC release 2 will be removed from the worker nodes at site NIKHEF-ELPROD per 02-February-2009. Users of the the PoC should migrate to release 3 of the PoC, which is already available.

Change in services

The Classic Storage Element tbn15.nikhef.nl (alias se03.nikhef.nl) will be removed from the information system at Monday 17-Nov-2008. Access via gridftp to the storage element will remain available until further notice.

After removal of the service from the information system, the lcg-* tools (e.g. lcg-cr, lcg-cp) can no longer be used to access the data on this storage element.data on this storage element.

EGEE-broadcast: https://cic.gridops.org/index.php?section=rc&page=broadcastretrieval&step=2&typeb=C&idbroadcast=37321

Where to go for which service

User Interface

any local NIKHEF workstation running SLC4 is capable of acting as a UI. For those of you who have been granted access to the NFPD Centralised UI: use ui03.nikhef.nl

BDII and Information System

bdii03.nikhef.nl (top-level) and siteinfo03.nikhef.nl (site GIIS), or use LDAP via, e.g., ldap://bdii03.nikhef.nl:2170/o=Grid

Computing Element

ce03.nikhef.nl (currenty: gazon.nikhef.nl)

Resource Broker

rb03.nikhef.nl (currently: boszwijn.nikhef.nl)

Workload Management System

graszode.nikhef.nl

Registration with one of the Dutch VOs is now avaialble from https://voms.grid.sara.nl:8443/vomses.