Condor Accounting Groups on Atlas

In May 2015, LIGO introduced mandatory accounting groups for jobs running on the LIGO data grid (LDG). As Atlas is part of the LDG and this information may be very useful for capacity review and planning, also non-LIGO users must use accounting groups for all their condor jobs.

tl;dr

Starting from June 2015 every job submitted to HTCondor must contain the stanza accounting_group = TAG, where TAG must be a legal string defined by LIGO or matching the regular expression /^(aei|et|glasgow)\.(prod|sim|dev)\./.

For more details, please read on.

What to add to submit files

It is fairly simple and straight forward. If you run jobs under your own user, simply add one line to each submit file:

accounting_group = accounting.tag

where the accounting.tag is described below.

If you run under a shared account (e.g. a project account specific to a search), please also add your normal user id (usually firstname.lastname) into the submit file, e.g.

accounting_group_user = firstname.lastname

That's essentially all you need to do. If your submit file does not contain the accounting_group line, submission will eventually fail with an error.

Specifying the accounting tag

LIGO users should follow the guide lines of their respective search groups, valid tags can be generated/received. A (currently) valid example for the submit file entry would be

accounting_group =  ligo.prod.o1.cbc.bbh.pycbcoffline

In order not to create too much complexity, non-LIGO users (or LIGO users who are performing non-LIGO work), should simply put their home institution at the start of the tag - for a list please refer to the next section. This is then followed by the "state" of the jobs (any one of the following tags: "dev" for development, "sim" for simulation and "prod" for production run). After this, a short descriptive tag should be used, e.g. "xray" for x-ray related searches, "dc" for detector characterization, "mdc" for mock data challenges, etc. The resulting tag could look like

accounting_group = et.sim.dc

or

accounting_group = glasgow.prod.xray

List of allowed top level tags

In order to keep clutter to a minimum, we will try to maintain an exhaustive list of institutions. If you need this list extended, please contact us!

In alphabetical order, we currently have

aei

users from AEI/Hannover as well as AEI/Potsdam

et

users working on the Einstein telescope

glasgow

users from Glasgow University

ligo

LIGO users are required to use ligo as their top level tag

-- CarstenAulbert - 08 May 2015