Draft Policy for Off-Site DMT Use
The DMT is primarily an operational tool for
automated status monitoring, debugging and fault diagnosis of the interferometer
hardware. These functions are vital for the proper operation of the LIGO
interferometers and must therefore have priority for ALL DMT resources,
such as:
-
DMT compute server processing power
-
Local DMT disk space
-
Bandwidth on dedicated Networks
-
etc.
Nevertheless, there are several uses for these
resources by external (off-site) users that are acceptable and in most
cases providing access for these uses becomes a necessity. The acceptable
uses for DMT resources by off-site users include the following:
-
Testing and diagnosing currently running equipment.
-
Testing and debugging software that requires
real-time data or data that is only available on-line (e.g. the
GDS test points).
-
Testing and debugging software intended to
be installed as a production monitor on a DMT server.
-
System management of the GDS servers.
In the near term (the latter half of 1999),
the major concerns are with the development and optimization of the monitoring
software itself, so we can afford to be much more lenient in the distribution
of accounts, and policing of processor load than will be the case in the
future. As the data monitors become increasingly important for the operation
of the installed equipment, the tolerance of casual use will decrease.
We intend to implement this policy in the
following manner:
Accounts will be created for individuals working
on projects that meet one or more of the criteria listed above. Contact
Daniel Sigg or John Zweizig to get an account.
The DMT server is to be used for compiling
and testing background monitors and running interactive tests and monitors
software. The numerous other ancillary processes (E-Mail, Calendars, editors,
Net browsers, etc) should be left on a General Computing (GC) host node.
The following steps have been taken to support this working style:
the DMT user accounts have the same IDs as
those of the GC user database.
The DMT home directories have been mounted
as /opt/dmt/<user> on one node (rainier)
and will be exported to other GC nodes as needed.
Unnecessary executables (netscape, emacs,
etc.) may be removed if they become a significant sink of resources.
Additional limitations may be placed on the
use of DMT resources as they become necessary to assure that the primary
monitoring functions will run without hindrance
Last Update: August 12, 1999
Please send comment and suggestions to: John
Zweizig