NWICG provides access to resources via Globus (or Condor-G), so you don’t exactly get an account on NWICG. What you do need is a user certificate, and then you need to have that certificate authorized for NWICG use.
The first step is to obtain an X.509 user certificate. Depending on where you are, this can be done in different ways:
Once you have obtained a user certificate, you will need to request your certificate be authorized to send jobs to NWICG. You may do this by emailing your certificate’s DN (distinguished name) to support@nwicgrid.org. DO NOT EMAIL YOUR PRIVATE KEY! We need only your DN, which will look something like “/CN=My Name/OU=Purdue TeraGrid/O=Purdue University/ST=Indiana/C=US” or “/DC=org/DC=doegrids/OU=People/CN=My Name 12345”. You may extract this from your certificate using the following command:
grid-cert-info -subject
Jobs are submitted to NWICG computational resources using Globus or Condor-G (which is a Condor interface to Globus). Jobs may be submitted from any machine with Globus client tools. One package which includes these is VDT, and the Open Science Grid packages a smaller subset of VDT for this purpose you may download and install. If you would like to submit jobs from a machine which already has such tools installed and working, NWICG offers one such submit host at each site:
Jobs on NWICG may be submitted to one of the NWICG Globus gatekeepers. These gatekeepers accept jobs and send them into the local queuing system for the requested resource. There are two primary gatekeepers currently on NWICG, and each is for a specific location and computational resource:
More details about these systems can be found on the NWICG Computational Resources Page.
To submit jobs, you will need to use either Globus tools or Condor-G tools. No matter what you use, you must first obtain your temporary proxy grid credentials. This is done by running:
globus-proxy-init
This proxy credential will automatically expire in a certain amount of time, usually 24 hours. You must rerun grid-proxy-init then to obtain fresh proxy credentials. You will be notified if your proxy expires and you try to submit another job, so don’t worry about this too much.
There are several methods and tools you may use for actual job submission. Which you choose to use may depend on your familiarity or personal preference. There should not be much difference in capabilities. Here are a few examples you should try to get started, and to ensure your user certificate is being accepted at each site:
If you need to manage a series and/or inter-related group of jobs, you may wish to explore using DAGMan. DAGMan is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) Manager and can be used with Condor-G:
Some commercial software packages are available on NWICG resources and can be used there. Here is a list of some of the most popular packages, their availability at each site, and instructions on how to access them:
If you need to run custom code on an NWICG resource, you will need to request special permission to obtain interactive use of a compilation machine. Once you compile your code there successfully, you can use it via the the normal routes outlined above on the primary compute resources. Note that NWICG may elect to only approve NWICG-sponsored researchers for access to an interactive compilation machine. These are:
For full details on any Globus RSL attributes or possibilities, refer to the Globus RSL Attribute Reference.