Open lmoureaux opened 2 months ago
cms-bot internal usage
A new Issue was created by @lmoureaux.
@Dr15Jones, @antoniovilela, @makortel, @mandrenguyen, @rappoccio, @sextonkennedy, @smuzaffar can you please review it and eventually sign/assign? Thanks.
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@lmoureaux , thanks for the suggestion. We will look in to it
By the way , cmssw-elX
container e.g. cmssw-cc7 or cmssw-el7
are not to replace lxplus type env. These are there to provide basic env to build/run cmssw executables. These containers are also used for running grid jobs so we would like to keep the size of these container in control. That is why many tools (condor for job submission, editors e.g.) which are available on build nodes/lxplus are not there in these containers.
By the way, did you try cmssw-el7 --interactive
which should start bash in interactive mode and then ls
coloring, or command autocompletion should work. vim
is already installed in containers.
By the way, if one knows that he/she wants to work with cc7/el7 releases then the following two can do what you requested
alias scram-el7='cmssw-el7 -- scram'
function scram-run(){
eval "cmssw-el7 -- 'cmsenv; $@'"
}
and then
> scram-el7 p CMSSW_10_6_30
> cd CMSSW_10_6_30
> scram-run git cms-addpkg FWCore/Utilities
> scram-el7 build -j 10
> scram-el7 build runtests -j 10
> scram-run which cmsRun
/cvmfs/cms.cern.ch/slc7_amd64_gcc700/cms/cmssw/CMSSW_10_6_30/bin/slc7_amd64_gcc700/cmsRun
> scram-run cmsRun --help
cmsRun [options] [--parameter-set] config_file
Allowed options:
-h [ --help ] produce help message
-p [ --parameter-set ] arg configuration file
-j [ --jobreport ] arg file name to use for a job report file:
default extension is .xml
-e [ --enablejobreport ] enable job report files (if any)
specified in configuration file
-m [ --mode ] arg Job Mode for MessageLogger defaults -
default mode is grid
-n [ --numThreads ] arg Number of threads to use in job (0 is
use all CPUs)
-s [ --sizeOfStackForThreadsInKB ] arg
Size of stack in KB to use for extra
threads (0 is use system default size)
-t [ --multithreadML ] MessageLogger handles multiple threads
- default is single-thread
--strict strict parsing
Thanks @smuzaffar!
I had checked the cmssw-el7
script 6 months ago and it wasn't working so well back then, so I moved on and didn't check again. Adding vim
, bash
, and zsh
to the images were certainly nice additions and they now appear more suitable for interactive use.
The scram-el7
and scram-run
commands you propose are also extremely useful. A nice side-effect of using scram-run
is that one doesn't need to run cmsenv
explicitly ever again. The drawback is that setting up the container takes about 1s and so does running cmsenv
, so scram-run echo
takes 2s.
Since scram
the tool used to manage the runtime environment of cmssw
, I still think it should understand when a container is needed. Minimally, the error message when no build is available for the host architecture should provide instructions for setting up a container (and recommend one for the production architecture).
Problem description
In the context of the widespread migration to Alma9, containers are needed for the widely-used CMSSW 10_6 series powering Run 2 UltraLegacy analyses. Images are available to be used through the
cmssw-cc7
command. Unfortunately, this comes with an important caveat for interactive usage because the images are not designed for this use case:vim
is not installed and one has to resort to the antiquatedvi
ls
colors are disabledIt is unfortunately not possible to build more comprehensive images based on CentOS 7 because the corresponding repositories have been removed.
In practice, the above means that users need to juggle between two shells: one running in Singularity to run
scram
and CMSSW commands, and another running in Alma9 for everything else. This is extremely frustrating.Desired behavior
I think part of the solution to these issues is for SCRAM to add container support. The behavior would be as follows:
scram project
creates a release for the production architecture.scram runtime
is used in an area whose architecture doesn't match the host, it sets up environment variables telling SCRAM to use a container.scram run
, allows running a command in the container environment. This is needed for commands likerivet
made available by CMSSW.Implementing this would greatly alleviate the pain of using CMSSW 10_6_X that many analyzes are currently facing.
In fact, I think SCRAM should embrace containers even further and use them regardless of the host architecture. Always running in a container will prevent the same issue from reappearing in the future.