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Installing ARVADOS on Debian + GNU Guix

Table of Contents

Arvados Introduction

With Arvados+GNU Guix we aim to crack two bioinformatics problems at the same time (well, maybe even more, but these are our two main problems):

  1. Get rid of the central FS bottleneck
  2. Create shareable pipelines

Arvados provides an answer to both, so in this document I’ll try and install Arvados on a small compute cluster. For this we will create a number of GNU Guix packages.

Creating a Debian base install

In this section we set up a base install of nodes to run Arvados tools.

The developers of Arvados use Debian Wheezy as a base install with an XFS file system. Wheezy also misses out on the systemd default. So Wheezy it is this time. Next time I do a cluster install it may be a native GUIX distribution which probably will miss out on systemd altogether (note I have systemd running on my desktop, I may change my mind about servers at some point).

Choice of ext4 vs XFS

In general, storing data on Linux should be considered `unsafe’. Arvados, however, promises redundancy across nodes, so we ought to be not too concerned with the underlying storage. Also, most of the jobs on this cluster will be transient. Similarly GNU Guix is also resistant to disk failure because it is easy to copy across nodes.

Taking a look at these benchmarks I decided to go for ext4 initially. We use 1TB drives and ext4 is (still) the standard on Linux. File writing and reading is mostly linear with Arvados FS and most bioinformatics tools, so it won’t make a huge difference. We can try XFS later.

USB-based server installation

Create bootable USB

Not all servers have a CDROM reader, so we need to create a bootable USB stick with a bootable partition. Debian instructions are here. Arvados requires amd64. So, basically, download an image (I usually take CD1 only) and dd it to the USB drive (directly; not to a partition):

dd if=imagefile of=/dev/sdxx bs=4M; sync
  679477248 bytes (679 MB) copied, 96.5819 s, 7.0 MB/s

Now it should boot and we can start server installs. This is a manual job. An automated install will be interesting once we scale up, but for now I only have to install some 10 machines and can’t be bothered.

With one machine the USB and CDROM boot did not work. I used debootstrap instead (the latter if you have a Debian login as root on the machine already).

Install server

It needed a little bios nudging, but the installation was easy. I just select the defaults for a minimal install (select ssh server, not the full desktop). I installed machines

fedor311: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
fedor312: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
fedor313: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
fedor314: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
fedor315: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 1TB
fedor316: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 1TB
fedor317: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
fedor318: 8 x Intel 2.66Hz (6Mb, 5333bogomips), 32G RAM, 3TB
dellR410: 8 x Intel 2.16Hz (2Mb, 4255bogomips), 24G RAM, 500GB

Partitioning the file system

The partitioning I opt for is usually sda1 root 10GB (for Debian), sda2 8GB swap, sda3 root2 (for upgrades) and LVM for the rest. GUIX will get a partition in there, as well as the home directories etc. At installation time only the first two need to be defined.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000739e6

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048    20965375    10481664   83  Linux
/dev/sda2        20965376    36589567     7812096   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3        36589568    57487359    10448896   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        57487360  1953525167   948018904    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        57489408  1953525167   948017880   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048    20973567    10485760   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2        20973568    37750783     8388608   83  Linux
/dev/sdb3        37750784    58722303    10485760   83  Linux
/dev/sdb4        58722304  3907029167  1924153432    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5        58724352  3907029167  1924152408   8e  Linux LVM

To get lvm use ‘apt-get install lvm2’.

Set up LVM

pvcreate /dev/sda5
pvcreate /dev/sdb5

Create a partition for GNU Guix

vgcreate volume_group1 /dev/sda5
vgcreate volume_group2 /dev/sdb5
vgchange -a y volume_group1
vgchange -a y volume_group2
lvcreate --size 64G -ngnu volume_group1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/volume_group1/gnu

And make sure it mounts on /gnu. In /etc/fstab

/dev/mapper/volume_group1-gnu  /gnu   ext4   defaults       0   2

Docker

Docker is used by Arvados. Docker should be latest (>1.5) and requires a Kernel upgrade.

Update the Linux kernel

To /etc/apt/sources.list add the line

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

and disable the CDROM ref in the file, while you are at it.

and

apt-get update
apt-cache search linux-image

will give the kernel to install, and

apt-get install -t wheezy-backports linux-image-amd64 linux-headers-amd64

will install the kernel + headers and update grub2 (boot). In one go, at this stage, it probably makes sense to include a few more packages

apt-get install -t wheezy-backports linux-image-amd64 \
        linux-headers-amd64 lvm2 ssh vim pigz bzip2 screen unzip  \
        sudo locales lynx mc rsync ncurses-bin \
        tzdata htop iftop gnupg \
        tree psmisc ntpdate pciutils screen
# (downloads 316Mb and answer two stupid questions, doh!)
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 en_GB.UTF-8 nl_NL.UTF-8
# dpkg-reconfigure locales

Arguably the last step is not needed, Guix comes with its own locale support. Make sure ssh still works after

/etc/init.d/ssh reload

And test kernel reboot and ssh login before moving the box to a remote location (no kiddin’).

At this point we have an installed system. It takes about 15 minutes of working time assuming the hardware behaves (it is worth checking BIOS settings, at least check what the machine should do on power failure).

From this point on the installation should be automated. For development and testing of automation I use a KVM virtual machine as described here.

Post install

After logging in for the first time I create an arvados user and disable root ssh

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication yes

followed by setting stronger passwords for root and the user. PasswordAutenthication should be disabled later.

Check

apt-get install firmware-linux

Automate, automate, automate

So far, it is pretty hard to automate things (though not impossible).

When working on the 3rd server I decided I needed to automate things. In the past I have worked with Cfengine and Chef (for example), but those tools are not exactly what I want out of installation control (though I like some of the philosophy in there). I’ll write out what I want and start simple (KISS). Arguably installation control can be part of GNU Guix - and I know people are doing that (even for VMs) so you can say deploy my-webserver with all configuration included. We aim to get there. But first Guix installation itself (which we can largely automate).

GNU Guix

So far, we have created a base Debian install. From here on we are going to use GNU Guix as the default package manager. In fact, everything on the system should be managed through Guix so as to create fully reproducible installs (whether it is on Debian, Centos, or Guix itself as a base distribution).

Install GNU Guix

We install the binary distribution (0.9) of Guix. And follow the procedure described in INSTALL.org#binary-installation and the sections after that for creating user-level access to Guix.

User settings

Assuming you have access to guix, we can set the environment in the user profile, especially the PATH and GUIX_LOCPATH, e.g.

export PATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/bin:$PATH
export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Installing Keep

Arvodos has a version that runs in a Docker container named Arvbox. The scripts to create the image are here. We won’t run arvbox, but try to get keepstore to run with the Arvados API server. In Arvbox keepstore is installed with

mkdir -p /var/lib/gopath cd /var/lib/gopath

export GOPATH=$PWD
mkdir -p "$GOPATH/src/git.curoverse.com"
ln -sfn "/usr/src/arvados" "$GOPATH/src/git.curoverse.com/arvados.git"
flock /var/lib/gopath/gopath.lock go get -t "git.curoverse.com/arvados.git/services/keepstore"
install bin/keepstore /usr/local/bin

mkdir -p /var/lib/arvados/$1

export ARVADOS_API_HOST=$localip:${services[api]}
export ARVADOS_API_HOST_INSECURE=1
export ARVADOS_API_TOKEN=$(cat /var/lib/arvados/superuser_token)

set +e
read -rd $'\000' keepservice <<EOF
{
 "service_host":"$localip",
 "service_port":$2,
 "service_ssl_flag":false,
 "service_type":"disk"
}
EOF
set -e

if test -s /var/lib/arvados/$1-uuid ; then
    keep_uuid=$(cat /var/lib/arvados/$1-uuid)
    arv keep_service update --uuid $keep_uuid --keep-service "$keepservice"
else
    UUID=$(arv --format=uuid keep_service create --keep-service "$keepservice")
    echo $UUID > /var/lib/arvados/$1-uuid
fi

set +e
killall -HUP keepproxy
exec /usr/local/bin/keepstore \
     -listen=:$2 \
     -enforce-permissions=true \
     -blob-signing-key-file=/var/lib/arvados/blob_signing_key \
     -data-manager-token-file=/var/lib/arvados/superuser_token \
     -max-buffers=20 \
     -volume=/var/lib/arvados/$1