Experimental Physics User's Guide

The scientific computing environment for experimental physics is comprised of a data analysis facility and its accompanying mass storage system. Details on the hardware are in the Scientific Computing Resources book.

The data analysis environment includes the batch "farm" (a compute cluster) plus its associated interactive nodes and disk storage systems.  Multiple files systems are accessible from both the interactive and batch nodes, and some of these are also accessible from desktops onsite.

SWIF2 is a software system developed at Jefferson Lab that aims to help users schedule, run, and track computation jobs on batch systems both locally and at remote sites. For those who seek a simple way to handle large data analysis workflow without worrying about staging files from the tape library, we recommand using SWIF2.  If you are an experimental physicist, you should use SWIF2.

Under the hood, the batch farm uses the Slurm workload Manager,  an open source, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable cluster management and job scheduling system for large and small Linux clusters, to manage our farm cluster. Slurm can be used to submit jobs directly (Jefferson Lab Slurm Guide documents), but SWIF2 is generally the better way to go.

New users of Farm resources (ifarm, farm, swif2, slurm, etc) are encouraged to review the following resources:

• Basics of Farm Computing (Tips & Tricks)
• SWIF2 Farm Submission Example
• See also: data.jlab.org