Ganga, grid usage, etc: Which practices are good and which are bad?

[ryuwd]

I've had differing responses to practices I've learned from the Starterkit, from what I've heard in Distributed Analysis, about a couple of things:

HTCondor usage

corresp. page: https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit-lessons/self-guided-lessons/htcondor.html

Apparently using HTCondor / LXBATCH is against LHCb fair usage policy? See
https://mattermost.web.cern.ch/lhcb/channels/distributed-analysis/s7ckr86kwpyxubu3n6mfsxupia

Replication of grid files to CERN-USER storage elements for analysis purposes

corresp. page: https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit-lessons/second-analysis-steps/managing-files-with-ganga.html
I've been discouraged from doing this, and told I should instead access my files by authenticating with a grid certificate.

[alexpearce]

This is a very useful issue! Thanks for bringing these points up, I've also heard them before.

The second point is being addressed in #258. For the first, perhaps the best thing to do is to just have a banner at the top of the page saying that LHCb has no usage quota on the HTCondor system? I suggest that rather than removing the page entirely because it is still useful; folks might not be familiar with the concept of batch systems, and may have access to similar set ups (perhaps also using HTCondor) at their home institutes. This page can still act as guidance for them.

What do you think?

[ryuwd]

I agree we shouldn't remove it entirely, this was good documentation for me to read and learn from. I guess the most important thing is people know that a fair usage policy exists, and that the grid job submissions will take it into account for you, while LXBATCH won't (and should be avoided)?
Then people know they should be focusing their efforts on getting familiar with ganga and Dirac first rather than LXBATCH/HTCondor if they want to be able to submit jobs from lxplus.

[alexpearce]

Agreed! Sounds like a great message.

Would you mind opening a PR with that? There is a 'info' block type that we could put this message inside at the top of each page.