JINR CICC complex

Central Information
and Computing Complex

OS: Scientific Linux 7
Exp. Software: CVMFS, /cvmfs/bmn.jinr.ru/centos7/
EOS Storage: 1 PB replicated, /eos/nica/bmn/
SLURM batch system: 7 252 Intel Xeon cores

Official Website


The JINR Central Information and Computing Complex (CICC) is constructed as a uniform information resource for all projects, in which the JINR participates. The detailed information on the complex, rules and registration form can be found on the official CICC Web-site.

CICC cluster machines are available for NICA users. To have an access to the CICC Computing Center, you need to request the account from administrators here. Once you have registered at the JINR CICC complex, you can login with your account on interactive lxui[01-04] machines (lxui[01-04].jinr.ru), e.g.:
ssh [username]@lxui01.jinr.ru
The necessary packages for BmnRoot, FairSoft and FairRoot are located on the CVMFS file system. To use them, load the environment script every time you enter the CICC cluster. In other way, you can add the command to the end of ~/.bashrc file to be automatically executed every time at login.
source /cvmfs/bmn.jinr.ru/config/x86_64-centos7/cluster_config.sh
Installation of the BmnRoot software is described here at the section “Installing the BmnRoot framework”.

The cluster storage system includes the following user disk spaces:
  • Home directory: /afs/jinr.ru/user/[username].
  • NICA user directory on CICC EOS file system: /eos/nica/bmn/users/[username], where the directory should be named by login of the user, e.g. mkdir /eos/nica/bmn/users/$USER.
  • Common user directory on CICC EOS file system: /eos/user/[username], for tests and not large data.
  • Scratch local space: /scr/u/ – a temporary local storage system, where the directory should be named by login of the user, e.g. mkdir /scr/u/$USER.
The BM@N experimental and simulated data are located at the CICC EOS distributed storage system (EOS documentation) mounted at /eos/nica/bmn/exp/ and /eos/nica/bmn/sim/ respectively. To work with EOS data, in addition to the possibility of direct using the mounted spaces, you can also employ XRootD and EOS protocols from any remote place, e.g. xrdcp and eos cp command to copy EOS files, or use root://eos.jinr.ru/ prefix to directly open EOS files in the ROOT environment (like root://eos.jinr.ru//eos/nica/bmn/exp/…).

To run your tasks on the CICC cluster, you can use SLURM batch system. If you know how to work with SLURM (SLURM on JINR CICC), you can use sbatch command on the cluster to distribute data processing. A simple example of such user job for SLURM can be found here.
NOTE. If you need to use temporary space on the batch machines, /tmp directory must not be used, use $TMPDIR directory instead (it is preferable to execute cd $TMPDIR at the beginning of the task and work there.
NICA-Scheduler has been developed to simplify running of user tasks without knowledge of SLURM. You can find how to use NICA-Scheduler here.