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Detailed Overview

This document outlines the overall installation process for an OSG site and provides many links into detailed installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and similar pages. If you do not see software-related technical documentation listed here, try the search bar at the top or contacting us at [email protected].

Plan the Site

If you have not done so already, plan the overall architecture of your OSG site. It is recommended that your plan be sufficiently detailed to include the OSG hosts that are needed and the main software components for each host. Be sure to consider the operating systems that OSG supports. For example, a basic site might include:

Purpose Host Major Software
Compute Entrypoint (CE) osg-ce.example.edu OSG CE, HTCondor Central Manager, etc. (osg-ce-condor)
Worker Nodes wNNN.cluster.example.edu OSG worker node client (osg-wn-client)

Prepare the Batch System

The assumption is that you have an existing batch system at your site. Currently, we support HTCondor, LSF, PBS and Torque, SGE, and Slurm batch systems.

For smaller sites (less than 50 worker nodes), the most common way to add a site to OSG is to install the OSG Compute Element (CE) on the central host of your batch system. At such a site - especially if you have minimal time to maintain a CE - you may want to contact help@opensciencegrid.org to ask about using an OSG-hosted CE instead of running your own. Before proceeding with an install, be sure that you can submit and successfully run a job from your OSG CE host into your batch system.

Add OSG Software

If necessary, provision all OSG hosts that are in your site plan that do not exist yet. The general steps to installing an OSG site are:

  1. Install OSG Yum Repos and the Compute Entrypoint software on your CE host
  2. Install the Worker Node client on your worker nodes.
  3. Install optional software to increase the capabilities of your site.

Note

For sites with more than a handful of worker nodes, it is recommended to use some sort of configuration management tool to install, configure, and maintain your site. While beyond the scope of OSG’s documentation to explain how to select and use such a system, some popular configuration management tools are Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and CFEngine.

General Installation Instructions

Installing and Managing Certificates for Site Security

Installing and Configuring the Compute Entrypoint

Adding OSG Software to Worker Nodes

Installing and Configuring Other Services

All of these node types and their services are optional, although OSG requires an HTTP caching service if you have installed CVMFS on your worker nodes.

Get Help

If you need help with your site, or need to report a security incident, follow the contact instructions.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1148698 and 1836650 . Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.