CMS Connect Quickstart

Created by Anonymous
Last updated: Nov 03, 2021 by CMS Connect Editors

ŒThis is a quick start page which should take only a few minutes to complete.

Registration and Login Access to CMS Connect

  • If not already registered to CMS Connect, go to the registration site and follow instructions there.
  • Once registered you are authorized to use  login-el7.uscms.org (EL7 Condor submit hosts) authenticating with SSH-keys. Please, follow this link for instruction on how to do that.
    • Once your public key is uploaded, please allow 3 to 4 of hours for the system to create your account in the submit node. To log in, you can type:

$ ssh username@login-el7.uscms.org

Setting up your proxy certificates

You will need a valid VO CMS grid proxy certificate in order to be able to submit your jobs.

  • If you don't have a valid grid proxy certificate, you need to apply for it. You can find more information on how to setup your proxy certificates here. 
  • If you already have a valid grid proxy certificate installed another remote machine like lxplus.cern.ch, you can simply copy them to the CMS Connect login machine. Just execute the following command from login.uscms.org and enter the username and password to access that remote machine.

$ copy_certificates 

			=================================================================================

			This script checks if you have globus certificates or lets you
			copy them from another machine otherwise (default: lxplus.cern.ch)
			NOTE: New certificates need to be requested first. Follow this Twiki for that:

			https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/WorkBookStartingGrid#ObtainingCert
			=================================================================================


Check for certificates in /home/yourusername/.globus

...

Couldn't find any certificates.
Copying certificates from another machine
Note: This requires certificates to be under the standard $HOME/.globus location
...

Enter hostname of machine to login: lxplus.cern.ch
Enter username for lxplus.cern.ch: yourusername

Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '188.184.70.205' to the list of known hosts.

Password: 

usercert.pem                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              100% 3526     3.4KB/s   00:00    
userkey.pem                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               100% 2009     2.0KB/s   00:01
All Done...
You can execute the following to initialize your proxy: 

voms-proxy-init -voms cms -valid 192:00


Submitting your Jobs

  • Important: Before you are able to submit any jobs, users are asked to set a default project for accounting. To do this, use the following commands:

    $ mkdir ~/.ciconnect
$ echo "cms.org.<typeDefaultGroupHere>" > ~/.ciconnect/defaultproject

    where "<typeDefaultGroupHere>" is the CMS group you belong to. For example: cms.org.nd, cms.org.cern, cms.org.fnal, etc. 

  • You can now start submitting your condor jobs. Your jobs will be sent to all US Tier Sites by default, but you can specify the CMS Sites you desire to use following this section. Jobs will be reported to the CMS Dashboard.
  • If you don't have experience submitting condor jobs, you can read the following Quick Tutorial.
  • For a CMSSW analysis example, you can follow this link.

Getting help

If anything here didn't work, please email cms-connect-support@cern.ch