Data Release Production

Travel Calendar

We use Google Calendar to keep track of group travel. Please ask Jim, Robert or John for access. Use it to share details of any substantial travel plans: vacations, conferences, etc. It is not expected that you record the minutiae of everyday life: please don’t bother telling us about your trip to the dentist, DMV, etc!

JIRA Usage

Use the following JIRA labels to identify related work. Please feel free to define more labels as needed; list those which might be of interested to others here. See also the project-wide Labels.

Label Meaning
auxtel Work related to the Auxiliary Telescope.
galmodel Work related to galaxy model fitting.
hsc Work requested and/or carried out by the HSC team.
pfs Work requested and/or carried out by the PFS team.
SciencePipelines Work which should be performed by either AP (02C.03) or DRP (02C.04), but it’s not (yet) clear which so we can’t easily set the “team” field.

Princeton HPC Systems

In addition to the regular LSST-provided compute systems (lsst-dev, the Verification Cluster, etc), DRP team members have access to two clusters hosted by the Research Computing Group in Princeton. Please refer to the Research Computing Group’s pages for information on getting started, how to connect with SSH, usage policies, FAQs, etc, and be aware that you must comply with all their rules when using these systems

Obtaining Accounts

Accounts are issued on demand at the request of an appropriate PI. For our group, that means you should speak to either Robert or John, and they will arrange one for you. When your account has been created, you should check that you are a member of the groups astro, hsc, and lsst (use the groups command).

Available Systems

Typically, LSST (and HSC) data processing is carried out using either the Tiger or Perseus clusters. Both of these have access to regularly-updated installations of the LSST “stack” through the shared /tigress filesystem. Be aware, however, that you must use a version of the stack corresponding to the operating system installed on the system you are using:

  • The Tiger system (accessed through the head node tiger2-sumire) should use /tigress/HSC/LSST/stack_tiger2;
  • Perseus should use /tigress/HSC/LSST/stack_perseus.

To initialize the stack in your bash shell, run:

module load rh/devtoolset/6
. /tigress/HSC/LSST/stack_tiger2/loadLSST.bash  # Or stack_perseus, as appropriate.
setup lsst_apps

Storage

HSC data (both public data releases and private data, which may not be shared outside the collaboration) is available in /tigress/HSC on both clusters. This filesystem is available from both clusters, and you may use it to store your results. However, note that space is at a premium, especially during our periodic HSC data release processing: please clean up any data you are not actively using.

Space is also available in your home directory, but note that it is not shared across clusters.

Cluster Usage

Jobs are managed on both systems using SLURM; refer to its documentation for details.

It is occasionally useful to be able to bring up an interactive shell on a compute node. The following should work:

salloc --nodes 1 --ntasks 16 --time=1:00:00  # hh:mm:ss

Connecting from Outside Princeton

Access to all of the Princeton clusters is only available from within the Princeton network. If you are connecting from the outside, you will need to bounce through another host on campus first. Options include:

If you choose the first option, you may find the ProxyCommand option to SSH helpful. For example, adding the follwing to ~/.ssh/config will automatically route your connection to the right place when you run ssh tiger:

Host tiger
    Hostname tiger3.princeton.edu
    ProxyCommand ssh coma.astro.princeton.edu -W %h:%p

See also the Peyton Hall tips on using SSH.

Help & Support

Contact cses@princeton.edu for technical support when using these systems. Note that neither the regular Peyton Hall sysadmins (help@astro) nor the LSST Project can provide help.