User Reference


New users

There are three requirements that must be fulfilled before new users can access the grid infrastructure:
  1. Users must own a personal X.509 Grid Certificate emitted by an accredited Certification Authority (CA). Your country CA or the LAC catchall CA are able to provide you one. The LAC CA list can be found further below.
  2. Users must be members of a Virtual Organization (VO) in order to run jobs at the grid. IGALC currently maintains the prod.vo.eu-eela.eu VO, and you can apply for membership here.
  3. Finally, users must have access to a User Interface (UI): either IGALC central one or the user’s own UI. Instructions for requesting access to the central UI and for deploying an UI can be found further below.

Certification Authorities

The first requirement to starting using the grid infrastructure is to obtain a digital certificate. Certificates are similar to ID cards or passports in the sense that they are credentials that are used to identify an entity. Certificates are issued by the so called certification authorities (CAs). A certification authority is a body that can issue certificates asserting that they identify and belong to a specific physical entity. The certificates used for grid computing are issued by special certification authorities called grid certification authorities. Users from countries with operational CAs must obtain their certificates from them. CA links:

Virtual Organization

IGALC currently maintains the prod.vo.eu-eela.eu Virtual Organization (VO). Refer to this link for membership requests.

Certificate Manipulation

This page contains useful information on common tasks involving certificate usage, such as email-signing, and certificate format conversion.

Central User Interface access

Access to central User Interface (UI) is requested via an email to support AT igalc.org. This email must:
  • be digitally signed with the user’s X509 certificate issued by a Certification Authority;
  • contain the SSH public key the user intends to use for accessing the UI*. Refer to this page for key generation instructions.
  • contain basic user identification:
full name
email
institution and country
certificate DN
preferred user names (two or three)

There are currently two central UIs: one in Brazil (UFRJ) and one in Spain (CETA-CIEMAT). Users will have accounts created on the machine that is geographically closer to them.

*UFRJ UI only, this is not necessary if you are closer to Spain than to Brazil.

User Interface deployment

Deployment of a User Interface (UI) requires knowledge of gLite middleware. The installation guides can be found here (32 bits) and here (64 bits). This siteinfo contains a site-info.def which is already configured with the core services to be used.

Running long jobs

In order to run jobs that last for more than 12 hours (standard proxy duration), one should follow these steps:
  • Add the following line to your JDL file: MyProxyServer = “〈PX_SERVER_HOSTNAME〉”.
  • Clear the GT_PROXY_MODE variable on the User Interface: unset GT_PROXY_MODE.
  • Create a standard proxy: voms-proxy-init --voms prod.vo.eu-eela.eu.
  • Start myproxy: myproxy-init -d -n -s〈PX_SERVER_HOSTNAME〉.
  • Grant the WMS the rights to renew your proxy: glite-wms-job-delegate-proxy -d〈PX_LOGIN〉.
  • Finally, run your job with glite-wms-job-submit -d〈PX_LOGIN〉〈YOUR_USUAL_JOB_CONFIGURATION〉.

To check your long-term proxy status, simply run myproxy-info -l 〈PX_LOGIN〉. Please note that you must have a valid short term proxy to do this.
Any value can be used for〈CREDENTIAL_NAME〉and〈PX_LOGIN〉, as long as they remain the same throughout the whole process.