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Tony Cass and Pietro Martucci, IT/PDP
The new RSPLUS interactive service was introduced on March 2nd, replacing CERNSP. As March 2nd was also the deadline for this CNL, we cannot be sure about the progress for this article but we are hopeful that the service will have been well received, since very few problems were reported during the trial period.
The only important difference that early RSPLUS users have noticed is that
the "lpr" command cannot be used to print files. Although "lpr" was made
to work on the SP2 when the CERNSP service was first introduced, this
command has never been fully supported on the other PLUS services, whilst
"xprint" has been the supported printing command on UNIX
services for some
time. There have been many improvements to xprint since the CERNSP
service was first introduced and, in particular, it is now possible to
pipe output to xprint. As such, we are sure that users will find that
xprint is an adequate replacement for lpr, although we understand the
inconvenience this change has caused.
Overall, however, we hope that users appreciate the migration to RSPLUS as the new service. Using 15 twin-processor PowerPC workstations it should provide much better performance than the 24 single processor SP2 nodes.
For batch users,
RSPLUS supports job submission with the "llsubmit"
command and general LoadLeveler query commands also work. However, the
special CERN extension commands (such as llmore and llps) cannot be used
from RSPLUS as they rely on special SP2-based authentication. If you need
to use these commands then it is still possible to connect to the SP2
nodes by logging into the
"sp2pub" service rather than "rsplus" (or
"cernsp"). However, as detailed in another article in this CNL,
LoadLeveler will be replaced by LSF as the job scheduler for the public
batch service and the RSPLUS nodes have a full interface to the LSF batch
environment.
"sp2pub" alias, we will be removing 16 of the nodes
from the cluster at the end of March. Further nodes may be removed from
the "sp2pub" cluster at a later date depending on the load. The
sp2pub service will remain available until the end of the LoadLeveler-based batch
service but will be turned off completely once the migration to LSF is
complete, expected to be at the end of June.
As for the "cernsp" name, this can still be used
but we strongly recommend
people to use the "rsplus" name for the new interactive service.
The
"CERNSP" name will be removed from the list of central services on NCD
X terminals and for PC network connections on June 1st. The CERNSP alias
will be removed completely on September 1st.