Preparation Guide for New PRAGMA Testbed Site


All PRAGMA member institutions are encouraged to contribute their systems and technical support to Routine-basis experiments in PRAGMA testbed.

 Non-member institutions may be able to participate as well. You may email to Cindy Zheng for initial contact.

 All participating sites are committed to a close collaboration within PRAGMA resources working group with their resources and technical expertise.

Here is the procedure for join PRAGMA testbed Grid:

  1. Identify one or more computer (or cluster) system(s) which can be shared with PRAGMA grid and satisfy the following minimum requirements:
    1. at least one front-end node
    2. at least one compute node (Most applications prefer 8 or more nodes or CPUs)
    3. at least one internet connection to the frond-end node
    4. at least 256MB RAM on each node
    5. at least 20GB disk space on each node
    6. running UNIX flavor operating system
    7. running Globus 4.x with all SDK bundles (data, GRAM, Info) built with the same flavor, Globus libraries are available on both front-end and compute nodes. (Globus 3.x and 2.x is ok, can be upgraded to Globus 4.x later.)
    8. running a job scheduler, such as SGE, PBS, SQMS or LSF
    9. has an users guide (sample guide) for the system published on the system's web site. See Asia Pacific Grid Middleware Deployment Guide.
  2. Identify one or more technical supporter for your system
  3. If you are building a new Rocks cluster, install the most current rocks system, this includes all required rolls and area51, hpc, java, web-server rolls, also sge or torque rolls.
  4. Email the following info to Cindy Zheng
    1. your site contact (management) name and email address
    2. technical supporter(s) name(s) and email address(es)
    3. your cluster's hostname / IP address
    4. if your clusters backend nodes are on a public network, the IP address range
    5. the info of the user account you just created for PRAGMA testbed monitoring
    6. specifications of your cluster
    7. your CA certificate and signing policy files (if your CA is IGTF approved, skip this item, mark it as "in IGTF distribution")
      If your institution does not have a certificate authority service yet and/or you are still using SimpleCA, you can:
      • Use PRAGMA experimental CA as short term solution (send request to Cindy), or
      • Setup your own certificate authority service. You may want try Naregi-CA or OpenCA, both are free and IGTF-compliant CA software.
    8. URL to your system's users guide
  5. Choose then follow one Grid authentication setup method from below:
    1. VOMS-aware setup (recommended)
      1. Implement firewall settings
      2. Follow the example setup procedure
    2. VOMS-unaware setup (may phase out in the future)
      1. Create an user account for PRAGMA testbed monitoring
        • Download user account info user account info pak
        • Please considering using the PRAGMA user account setup script
          • Download the script
          • To run the script, make it executable, login as root and run
            (for example) # ./pragma_setuser zhengc.tar.gz
          • You may modify the script to fit your system and site policies
        • If you are not going to use the PRAGMA user account setup script, please unzip and untar the user info pak and use all the info and files provided there to setup the user account.
      2. To make your cluster function as a part of PRAGMA Grid, you also need to do 1, 2, 3a. in batch update
  6. Install SCMSWeb. As soon as it's working, email Cindy the URL of your SCMSWeb page
  7. Install Gfarm
  • Cindy will From there on, you will be a part of the PRAGMA testbed and working closely with PRAGMA friends on our Routine-basis experiments.