Manchester Pool Accounts

In order to avoid grid users to ask to open accounts at each site the concept of pool accounts was developed (for the record by Andrew in Manchester). Other names you might find around are dynamic accounts or generic accounts.

A pool account is a generic account assigned to a user DN (Distinguished Name) on a cluster on the grid. It is the same on all the Worker Nodes (WN) on a cluster but might change from cluster to cluster. In Manchester for example we have two clusters for manageabilty and availability reasons and your DN might be mapped on different pool accounts. Each VO has a set (or more than one) of pool accounts. Pool accounts unused for a while are recycled by the system.

So for example if you are a babar user and you submit a job on the grid you could be mapped to a user id that looks like babar005, if you are atlas you could be mapped to atlas024, if you belong to dzero....

The concept of pool accounts is based on dynamic IP. When you connect to your ISP from home your machine is assigned a dynamic IP and machine name, different ISPs different IPs and names; the same happens when you submit a job to the grid you get a pool account rather than your personal account.

You can find more technical information on Pool Accounts page.