sPHENIX discussion of software

[John Haggerty <haggerty AT bnl.gov>]

Martin,

This is nice, and I think it's useful for people who want to get started 
but don't have quite the right computing environment available to them. 
 Good and useful as it is, but I thought I'd share some ruminations on 
where it might lead and what else I think would be nice.

The last times I played with VM's, with the ones distributed by CMS and 
some earlier futzing around just to see how they worked, after the 
initial glow of wonder at how well it all works, I thought that what I 
really needed was an army of VM clones that have access to large amounts 
of CPU and disk space, or else it's just a convenience to compile when 
you're on an airplane.  In a sense, a decided I needed a cloud of VM's, 
instead of a VM in the clouds.  Where should this cloud of VM's be?  The 
obvious place is in RCF, so I can just remote desktop in to my now 
powerful and always running army of VM's, with access to plenty of disk 
space.  It would be a different way of doing business, but one that 
would insulate us from the underlying OS.

I should say that I have had another use for VM's, namely to deal with 
the Project files, which require a Windows machine on which to run MS 
Project.  I could not find a way to run a VM on a machine that would be 
accessible outside the PHENIX universe, so I purchased a few Amazon 
Workspace instances running Windows servers.  If I could run the VM 
myself in RCF, that would save me both money and the hassle of trying to 
figure out how to pay Amazon.

On 8/7/15 4:30 PM, Martin Purschke wrote:
> Dear sPHENIX Software aficionados,
>
> last week at the SBU workfest and later at the simulations meeting, we
> kicked the idea around that we would make a number of ready-made virtual
> machines available that would allow anyone not set up on the RCF, or
> without access to the sPHENIX environment within the RCF, to quickly run
> sPHENIX simulations by running the VM.
>
> You can look a Dave's and my presentation in the Indico page of the
> simulation meeting,
> https://indico.bnl.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1185
>
> I had prepared a VM with all ingredients on board to run at least the
> tutorials from the workfest (the VM has *everything* you'd need for a
> full simulation effort). I had prepared the VM using VmWare, then cloned
> this machine to a VirtualBox environment.
>
> The VirtualBox-VM can be found in downloadable form at
>
> https://www.phenix.bnl.gov/WWW/p/draft/purschke/geantvm/
>
> Right now you'll find a geant4vm2.ova "export" file in the area. The
> size is about 3.3G. If you have installed VirtualBox on your machine,
> you can download and then import the geant4vm2.ova file and have the
> same machine that I showcased at the Simulations meeting.
>
> The machine starts in console mode since I don't want to mess with your
> X11 environment without you in control.  You can either log in and
> "startx", or become root and "telinit 5". Or you an permanently change
> the default run level to 5 once you see that it works.
>
> The user is "geant4user", pw geant4%user, same for root.
>
> I will add the corresponding VmWare machine to the same area over the
> weekend.
>
> I'll update this list as progress is made - I will add recipes how to
> update the existing VM to get the lastest builds etc over time.
>
> The machine was initially made on my Mac. I just downloaded and imported
> it in virtualbox on my Ubuntu Desktop in my office - works like a charm.
>
> Please let me know if you run into trouble.
>
> Best,
>         Martin


--
John Haggerty
email: haggerty AT bnl.gov
cell: 631 741 3358