sPHENIX discussion of software

[pinkenburg <pinkenburg AT bnl.gov>]

Hi folks,

a lot of the condor job files I see are completely outdated - going back 
to examples which floated around 10-15 years ago. Settings like
+Job_Type       = "cas"
+Experiment     = "phenix"
Requirements = CPU_Experiment == "phenix"
are obsolete (job_type, experiment) or counter productive (these 
Requirements will restrict you to 2 nodes, good luck running a lot of 
jobs there). The really problematic one is the

# Email address to send notification to.
###Notify_user     = me AT somemailserver.com

which was promoted in examples from 10+ years ago. This will result in 
an email send to that address - normally in cases of errors. Now you 
submit 10k condor jobs which get evicted for some reason which results 
in 10k emails in your inbox. What caused problems yesterday was that the 
job file used an invalid email address on a valid domain which then 
bounces, sending 10k emails back to BNL (at which point it was noticed 
since it looked like a DOS attack).

A farm is to first order an error multiplier and with the resources 
available to you in sdcc you multiply every problem by 4 orders of 
magnitude. So - please have a look at your job files and at least remove 
the notification settings and the notify_user. We keep a minimal condor 
job file example in our wiki:

https://wiki.sphenix.bnl.gov/index.php/Condor#simple_condor_job_file

If you use one of these old examples - the best you can do is remove it 
(all those ranking statements won't do you any good either) and start 
fresh with this one. In here you will also find a nice improvement of 
the queue command which makes passing parameters to your job so much 
easier then the $(Process).

Thanks,
Chris

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Christopher H. Pinkenburg       ;    pinkenburg AT bnl.gov
                                ;    http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~pinkenbu

Brookhaven National Laboratory  ;    phone: (631) 344-5692
Physics Department Bldg 510 C   ;    fax:   (631) 344-3253
Upton, NY 11973-5000

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