__   __ ______  _   _   ____   _   _      _______ 
 \ \ / /|  ____|| \ | | / __ \ | \ | |    |__   __|
  \ V / | |__   |  \| || |  | ||  \| | _ __  | |   
   > <  |  __|  | . ` || |  | || . ` || '_ \ | |   
  / . \ | |____ | |\  || |__| || |\  || | | || |   
 /_/ \_\|______||_| \_| \____/ |_| \_||_| |_||_|   

                    The UChicago Analysis Center 

Jupyter Notebook Starter Script

This package contains a standardized way to start up jupyter notebooks jobs on the Midway Cluster at UChicago. This is meant to be a working template; that is, you might want/need to modify the script slightly for your particular use, but it should work out of the box for most things.

We strongly recommend you understand what the script is doing so that if something breaks you can try to find a work around without relying on someone else fixing it, which can take time.

Installation

Login to midway/dali. For directions on getting accounts setup etc, see here.

ssh {username}@dali.rcc.uchicago.edu

Decide where you would like to put the env_starter repository. It should probably be somewhere in your home directory.

cd path/to/wherever/you/want/env_start

Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:XENONnT/env_starter.git

Testing your installation

To test that the env_starter script is working, do the following (still on Midway):

cd env_starter
./start_jupyter.py

You should see a nice splash screen similar to above, and then a lot of output, eventually with something like this:

Jupyter started succesfully
	Dumping URL {some url} to cache file /home/ershockley/.
	last_jupyter_url
	Parsing URL {some url}

All done! If you have linux, execute this command on your laptop:

{some ssh command && sensible-brower command}

If you have a mac, instead do:

{some ssh command && some open command}

Happy strax analysis, ershockley!

These comands are what you should run on your personal laptop, not on Midway itself. Before running those, however, it is useful to understand what is happening here. What this script did was submit a job to the Midway cluster that started up a jupyter notebook. Let's first confirm that we can see a job running. Below, everywhere you see ershockley you should see your own username.

[ershockley@dali-login1 env_starter]$ squeue -u $USER
             JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER ST       TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
          12196471   xenon1t straxlab ershockl  R       0:17      1 midway2-0416

Above you can see a single job running, called straxlab. This job is running a jupyter lab/notebook session. In order to connect to that jupyter session on your own personal laptop/web browser, you need to run the ssh command listed above.

ssh -fN -L {something} && {sensible-broswer/open something}

What this does is setup an ssh tunnel between the machine you run those commands on (again, not Midway!) and the worker node on Midway that is actually running the jupyter notebook. Everything after the && is opening a web browser and pointing it to the url where you can see the jupyter notebook.

Standard Usage

This script submits jobs to the midway cluster and so must be executed on midway itself. However, it is convenient to execute it over ssh from your personal machine:

ssh {username}@dali.rcc.uchicago.edu /path/to/your/env_starter/env_starter/start_jupyter.py

You should then see the output as above and then be able to access the notebook.

Arguments

There are several arguments you can pass to start_jupyter.py to customize your job.

usage: start_jupyter.py [-h] [--partition PARTITION] [--bypass_reservation] [--node NODE]
                        [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--cpu CPU] [--ram RAM] [--gpu] [--env {singularity,cvmfs}]
                        [--tag TAG] [--force_new] [--jupyter {lab,notebook}] [--notebook_dir NOTEBOOK_DIR]
                        [--copy_tutorials] [--local_cutax]

Start a strax jupyter notebook server on the dali batch queue

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --partition PARTITION
                        RCC/DALI partition to use. Try dali, broadwl, or xenon1t.
  --bypass_reservation  Do not use the notebook reservation (useful if it is full)
  --node NODE           Specify a node, if desired. By default no specification made
  --timeout TIMEOUT     Seconds to wait for the jupyter server to start
  --cpu CPU             Number of CPUs to request.
  --ram RAM             MB of RAM to request
  --gpu                 Request to run on a GPU partition. Limits runtime to 2 hours.
  --env {singularity,cvmfs}
                        Environment to activate; defaults to "singularity" to load XENONnT singularity
                        container. Passing "cvmfs" will use the conda environment installed in cvmfs, using
                        the --tag argument to determine which env exactly
  --tag TAG             Tagged environment to loadSee 
  wiki page https://xe1t-wiki.lngs.infn.it/doku.php?id=xenon:xenonnt:dsg:computing:environment_tracking Default: "development", or --
                        equivalently -- "latest"
  --force_new           Start a new job even if you already have an old one running
  --jupyter {lab,notebook}
                        Use jupyter-lab or jupyter-notebook
  --notebook_dir NOTEBOOK_DIR
                        The working directory passed to jupyter
  --copy_tutorials      Copy tutorials to ~/strax_tutorials (if it does not exist)
  --local_cutax         enable the usage of local installation of cutax

We highlight just a few here. First, the --env argument is used to specify either singularity (which is the default) or cvmfs. The default one will run in a singularity container, which is isolated from the host system software. This means you will not be able to run, for example sbatch or other SLURM commands from inside the container. The cvmfs env, however, does not have this problem, but it is more likely to have environment conflicts from the host system, which can often affect rucio-related commands.

The --tag argument is used to specify which tag of base_environmnent to use. This applies to both the singularity and cvmfs environments. It defaults to development, the most up-to-date env.

If you are developing cutax and want to use your local installation, you can add --local_cutax.

Convenient shortcuts

SSH profile and key authentication. It is useful to add midway to your ssh profile so you can use shorter names when sshing. See here. My ~/.ssh/config looks like the following:

Host dali
User ershockley
Hostname dali-login1.rcc.uchicago.edu

pairing this with ssh-key authentication, it is very easy to login to midway:

Evans-MacBook-Air:~ shocks$ ssh dali
Last login: Mon Jul 19 10:59:02 2021 from wireless-169-228-79-134.ucsd.edu
===============================================================================
                               Welcome to Midway
                           Research Computing Center
                             University of Chicago
                            http://rcc.uchicago.edu

Aliases. You can use aliases to make running this script more convenient. Perhaps easiest is just make an alias on your personal machine. On Linux you can add aliases to ~/.bashrc and for MacOS it is ~/. bash_profile. For your respective machine, add an alias like the following (note this assumes you have setup the ssh config as above):

alias notebook="ssh dali /path/to/your/env_starter/start_jupyter.py"

Then on your personal machine you can then start up a notebook just with the command notebook. You can also pass any arguments as you normally would. For example:

Evans-MacBook-Air:~ shocks$ notebook --container xenonnt-2021.07.1.simg

 __   __ ______  _   _   ____   _   _      _______
 \ \ / /|  ____|| \ | | / __ \ | \ | |    |__   __|
  \ V / | |__   |  \| || |  | ||  \| | _ __  | |
   > <  |  __|  | . ` || |  | || . ` || '_ \ | |
  / . \ | |____ | |\  || |__| || |\  || | | || |
 /_/ \_\|______||_| \_| \____/ |_| \_||_| |_||_|

                    The UChicago Analysis Center
                    
Submitting a new jupyter job
	Submitting sbatch /home/ershockley/straxlab/notebook.sbatch
	sbatch returned: b'Submitted batch job 12229201\n'
	You have job id 12229201
Waiting for your job to start
	Looking for logfile /home/ershockley/straxlab/notebook.log
	still waiting...
Job started. Logfile is displayed below; we're looking for the jupyter URL.
	Starting jupyter job
	Using singularity image: /project2/lgrandi/xenonnt/singularity-images/xenonnt-2021.07.1.simg

Another option would be to make an alias on midway. This involves one extra step. First, make the alias in your ~/.bashrc, which for me looked like this:

alias start_notebook="/home/ershockley/nt/computing/env_starter/start_jupyter.py"

But in order for this to run via ssh you also need to add this to the very top of your .bashrc:

if [ -z "$PS1" ]; then
  shopt -s expand_aliases
fi

as discussed in this stackexchange thread. After this, you should then be able to run something like:

Evans-MacBook-Air:~ shocks$ ssh dali start_notebook --container xenonnt-2021.07.1.simg

Further Customization

This script is used to create an .sbatch script that then gets submitted to the cluster. If the arguments/customization listed above do not include any changes you need, you can of course modify the sbatch script directly. By default, this script gets written to

~/straxlab/notebook.sbatch

which should serve as a good template to make further changes. If you do this, we recommend copying your customized sbatch script to a new filename, as otherwise it will be overwritten next time you run start_jupyter.py.