2 October 2008: Brunel-GridPP has passed conformance tests and been granted NGS Affiliate status.
Brunel-GridPP is a service provided by the Centre for Sensors and Instrumentation at Brunel University. Our primary focus is particle physics, and the provision of a Tier 2 resource to the EGEE/LCG Grid to support experiments at the LHC. Some of the resources are available to other users, such as those of the NGS via the NGS VO.
The resource currently has 4 cores available. Each node has 2 GB of main memory shared between 2 processors. The farm currently runs Scientific Linux (CERN) 4.7; we hope to move to a larger cluster with Scientific Linux 5.2 as soon as a production release of the gLite middleware becomes available.
Users' home directories are NOT shared across the cluster.
Up to 2 processors are available to a single parallel job. There are two queues available to NGS users: the "production" queue usually has a CPU time-limit of 30 hours and a total ("wall-clock") limit of 36 hours whilst the "short" queue has limits of 30 min. and 1 hour respectively. Any jobs overrunning these limits will be terminated with extreme prejudice. Queue names and limits may change occasionally - this is published automatically into the information system, and the Resource Broker will deal with it on your behalf as long as you specify your requirements in the JDL correctly.
NGS VO users have access to SRM based storage on dgc-grid-50.brunel.ac.uk.
More information about the hardware configuration can be found here.
Access to the nodes is via gLite middleware (and the PBS batch system). SRB is not available.
GSI-SSH is NOT available. We suggest that you submit jobs using the NGS Resource Broker, making sure to put a wall-clock requirement into your JDL to ensure your jobs lands in a suitable queue.
Nodes have GCC (C/C++/F77) and a Java SDK installed.
Any queries regarding the NGS at Brunel-GridPP should be submitted by email to the NGS support desk: support@grid-support.ac.uk
