Interface to the DIRAC grid#

From the README of DIRAC:

DIRAC is an interware, meaning a software framework for distributed computing. DIRAC provides a complete solution to one or more user community requiring access to distributed resources.

Within the CTA consortium it is possible to operate CTA software on the DIRAC grid by means of CTADIRAC, a CTA-customized version of the DIRAC middleware.

The interface to the DIRAC grid allows to launch protopipe jobs and scale up the amount of data which is inevitably required to obtain enough statistics (either for specific studies on intermediate data levels or to produce full CTA performance products).

Requirements#

Base environment#

Aside from protopipe itself, if you want to operate on the DIRAC grid you will need a set of additional software packages.

Recipes for a base environment are stored in the root directory of the interface code repository.

After its creation you have to install first protopipe (protopipe) and then its interface (Installation).

DIRAC GRID certificate#

In order to access DIRAC utilities you will need a certificate associated with an account linked to your institution.

You can find all necessary information at here.

Installation#

Also the interface to the DIRAC grid can be installed both in development mode or as a released package.

Released version#

Important

After the Python3 upgrade of DIRAC and CTADIRAC, the interface installation and usage have changed considerably, while its relation with protopipe has only improved. It is extremely unlikely that you will ever need to work with a version older than v0.4.0, but if this were to happen, please check older versions of this documentation either from readthedocs or from the repository of protopipe.

You can install install it as a Python3-based package in your environment like so,

pip install git+https://github.com/HealthyPear/protopipe-grid-interface@vx.y.z

The following table refers to all versions and their compatibility with protopipe.

Versioning#
protopipe	GRID interface
v0.5.X	v0.4.X
v0.4.X	v0.3.X
v0.3.X	v0.2.X
v0.2.X	v0.2.X

Both the latest released version and the development version of the interface are compatible with the development version of protopipe.

Development version#

This version is:

always compatible with the development version of protopipe,
possibly compatible with the latest release of protopipe,

The installation procedure is the following:

git clone https://github.com/HealthyPear/protopipe-grid-interface.git
cd protopipe-grid-interface
pip install -e '.[all]'

Setup the working environment#

In order to be able to download and upload files from and to the DIRAC grid you need to initialize the Virtual Organisation Membership Service (VOMS).

This is a one time operation to be perfomed after the environment creation and activation:

conda env config vars set X509_CERT_DIR=$CONDA_PREFIX/etc/grid-security/certificates
conda env config vars set X509_VOMS_DIR=$CONDA_PREFIX/etc/grid-security/vomsdir
conda env config vars set X509_VOMSES=$CONDA_PREFIX/etc/grid-security/vomses

then you will need to reactivate your environment.

Also only the first time, in order to use the CTADIRAC production instance, you should configure your client using the dirac-configure command. You will be asked to generate your proxy and then to choose the Setup and the Configuration server. You need to choose the default values.

Warning

The configuration system defaults could lack redundance depending on the version of CTADIRAC. It is suggested to check or edit the configuration file that you can find inside your conda enviroment under etc/dirac.cfg like the following,

DIRAC
{
Setup = CTA
Configuration
{
  Servers = dips://dcta-servers02.pic.es:9135/Configuration/Server
  Servers += dips://dcta-servers02.pic.es:9135/Configuration/Server
  Servers += dips://dcta-agents02.pic.es:9135/Configuration/Server
  Servers += dips://ccdcta-server04.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
  Servers += dips://ccdcta-server05.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
  Servers += dips://ccdcta-web01.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
}
Security
{
  UseServerCertificate = no
}
}
LocalInstallation
{
Setup = CTA
ConfigurationServer = dips://dcta-servers02.pic.es:9135/Configuration/Server
ConfigurationServer += dips://dcta-agents02.pic.es:9135/Configuration/Server
ConfigurationServer += dips://ccdcta-server04.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
ConfigurationServer += dips://ccdcta-server05.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
ConfigurationServer += dips://ccdcta-web01.in2p3.fr:9135/Configuration/Server
SkipCAChecks = True
}

For the subsequent times, it will be sufficient to generate the proxy with dirac-proxy-init (it will lasts up to 24h if you don’t exit the environment before).

Now you can proceed with the analysis workflow (Large scale analyses).

protopipe

Options for containerization