NOMAD remote tools hub (North)

NOMAD and FAIRmat
2

Hello Alex,

The documentation that you we refering to is just the developer docs for the tool images. It will not really help you to get the installation going. Also the images already exist in our registry and you do not need to create them.

Please understand that we did not officially released the NORTH functionality yet, not even as a beta. There are still things we fix to fix the docker-compose installation for NORTH. Anyhow, here is the best current information to get it run. This only applies to linux systems and linux docker.

  1. Use the quick start installation documented here (it might be worthwhile to read the rest as well).

  2. Make sure that you have a user nomad with user-id 1000 and that this user is allowed to use docker. NOMAD will run everything with this user and it must be able to create and start containers. Typically you have to create the user and add it to the docker group, e.g:

useradd --uid 1000 nomad
usermod -aG docker nomad
  1. Make sure that the .volumes directories exist and make sure they belong to the user-id 1000 user:
mkdir -p .volumes/fs/north/shared
mkdir -p .volumes/fs/north/users
mkdir -p .volumes/fs/public
mkdir -p .volumes/fs/staging
chown -R 1000 .volumes
  1. There is a bug in the nginx.config that you downloaded from the quick-start installation. On line 50 change location ~ /hub/ { to location ~ /north/ {

These steps should allow you to start containers. If something does not work, please include the logs of the nomad_oasis_hub container (docker logs nomad_oasis_hub) when you report this here.

It might be good to manually prefetch images with docker pull. I recommend to use the jupyter image for your tests:

docker pull jupyter/datascience-notebook

For trouble shooting it might be sensible to start containers directly from jupyterhub and not from the NOMAD gui for testing. Use your browser to go to .../nomad-oasis/north/hub/home, you can create a named server called jupyter. This one should work. Unnamed servers (“start my server”) are not supposed to work. The name has to match a pre-configured tool.

  1. There is still a problem with mounting uploads and other files. So you won’t see any of the nomad files. Add this patched jupyterhub_config.py to all the other files and mount it into the hub. In your docker-compose add the following volume to the hub container:
- ./jupyterhub_config.py:/app/nomad/jupyterhub_config.py

jupyterhub_config.py (9.8 KB)

We will include these “patches” in a next release.