The CCFR (Centres de Calcul Français) network is dedicated to very high speed and interconnects the three French national computing centres: CINES, IDRIS and TGCC. This network is made available to users to facilitate data transfers between the national centres. The machines currently connected on this network are Joliot-Curie at TGCC, Jean Zay at IDRIS, and Adastra at CINES.

Using this network requires that you have logins (different for each center) in at least two of the three centres and that they are authorized to access the CCFR network in the concerned centres.

Comments:

• For your IDRIS login, the request for access to the CCFR network can be made:
  • when you request to create an account from eDARI portal,
  • or by filling the section entitled “Acces the CCFR network” in the Administration Form for Login Accounts (FGC) and send it to from an institutional address. Note that this procedure requires the signatures of the user and of the security manager of your laboratory.
• Moreover, not all of the Jean Zay nodes are connected to this network. To use it from IDRIS, you can use the front-end nodes jean-zay.idris.fr and jean-zay-pp.idris.fr.

For more information, please contact the User Support Team ().

Data transfers between the machines of the centres via the CCFR network constitute the principal service of this network. A command wrapper ccfr_cp accessible via a modulefile is provided to simplify the usages:

$ module load ccfr

This ccfr_cp command automatically recuperates the connection information of the specified machine (name domain, port number) and detects the authentication possibilities. By default, the command will opt for basic authentication, using the traditional methods in force on the targeted machine.
The ccfr_cp command is based on the rsync tool and configured to use the SSH protocol for transfers. The copy is recursive and keeps the symbolic links, the access rights and the dates of file modifications.
The command details and the list of the machines accessible on the CCFR network are available by specifying the -h option to the ccfr_cp command.

For transfers from jean-zay to CINES and TGCC machines, you can use commands similar to theses:

$ module load ccfr
$ ccfr_cp /path/to/datas/on/jean-zay login_cines@adastra:/path/to/directory/on/adastra:
$ ccfr_cp /path/to/datas/on/jean-zay login_tgcc@irene:/path/to/directory/on/irene:

For transfers from Adastra, the procedure is similar except that you must use the machine adastra-ccfr.cines.fr (accessible from adastra.cines.fr) as shown on CINES documentation.
For transfers from Irene, the procedure is also similar and can be carried out directly from the front-end nodes irene-fr.ccc.cea.fr. After connecting to the machine, the machine.info command will give you all the useful information.

A ccfr_sync command, variant of ccfr_cp, enables a strong synchronisation between the source and the destination by adding, compared to the ccfr_cp command, the deletion of the destination files which are no longer present in the source. The -h option is also available for this command.

Remark: These commands will use a basic authentication with password in compliance with the terms and conditions in force at the remote centre (CINES or TGCC). You will therefore certainly be required to provide a password each time. To avoid this, you can use IDRIS transfer-only certificates (valid for 7 days) whose instructions for use are defined on the IDRIS website. Using such certificates will force you to initiate transfers from the remote machine adastra-ccfr.cines.fr (accessible from adastra.cines.fr) for CINES and irene-fr.ccc.cea.fr for TGCC after having copied the transfer-only certificate on the remote machine and to build the rsync transfer commands yourself (so do not use the ccfr_cp and ccfr_sync wrappers). You can then draw inspiration from the following examples to make your transfers:

# Simple copy from jean-zay to remote machine (initiated on remote machine)
# using transfert-only certificate registered in ~/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync on remote machine
$ rsync --human-readable --recursive --links --perms --times --omit-dir-times -v \
  -e 'ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync' \
  login_idris@jean-zay-ccfr.idris.fr:/path/on/jean-zay /path/on/adastra/or/irene
 
# Strong synchronization (--delete option) from jean-zay to remote machine (initiated on remote machine)
# using transfert-only certificate registered in ~/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync on remote machine
$ rsync --human-readable --recursive --links --perms --times --omit-dir-times -v --delete \
  -e 'ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync' \
  login_idris@jean-zay-ccfr.idris.fr:/path/on/jean-zay /path/on/adastra/or/irene

Attention : On adastra-ccfr.cines.fr, the id_ecc_rsync certificate must be visible from your directory /home/login_cines/.ssh so that the ssh command can use it (no environment variable is defined for this disk space). You must therefore take care to unarchive the certificate in this directory with a command like:

login_cines@adastra-ccfr.cines.fr:~$ unzip ~/transfert_certif.zip -d /home/login_cines/.ssh
Archive: /lus/home/.../transfert_certif.zip
inflating: /home/login_cines/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync
inflating: /home/login_cines/.ssh/id_ecc_rsync.pub