About this page
The GRID is a globally distributed data analysis system for high energy physics, which stored petabytes of data and simulation. Back in the day it was quite frustrating to use, so someone created a list of achievements to make the process a bit more bearable. Thankfully things are a lot easier now.
I didn't write this. I can't remember where it came from, I'm just sharing the joy.
The achievements
- 1: Baptism of Fire
- Run your first grid job.
- 2: Take The Blue Pill
- Escape the sandbox.
- 3: Lazarus
- A job reported killed still returns results.
- 4: I'm Doing Science And I'm Still Alive
- A job resists three separate attempts to kill it.
- 5: Heisenjob
- A job that produces both successes and at least two different error conditions on a homogenous dataset.
- 6: By The Numbers
- Collect 50 different return codes.
- 7: Calculating Tea
- A job that is killed for excess CPU usage.
- 8: Accurate Representation of Pi
- A job killed for excess memory usage.
- 9: Divine Intervention
- A job that brings you the attention of a sysadmin.
- 10: Self Aware
- A job which adapts itself depending on which site it is running at.
- 11: Kicking The Puppy
- A job that makes a sysadmin cry.
- 12: Nemesis
- Your face graces a sysadmin's darts board.
- 13: Woodpecker
- A job that crashes a worker node requiring a manual restart.
- 14: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
- A job that thrashes a hard disk to death.
- 15: The Only Way To Be Sure
- A job that sets fire to a tape library.
- 16: Whom the Gods Would Destroy
- Receive a expeditious response to a ticket.
- 17: Hammer of the Gods
- Be blacklisted from one or more sites.
- 18: Singularity
- Consume your own lifetime's worth of CPU time.
- 19: The Pedantry Is Strong With This One
- Invoke Zeno's Paradox in relation to "Singularity".
- 20: Hello World
- A job that sends you email.
- 21: Time's Arrow
- A job submitted with IP over neutrino flux which returns before submission.
- 22: Total Recall
- Every job of at least 100 succeeds and stages out.
- 23: The Sun Never Sets On
- A task running concurrently on six continents.
- 24: Identity Matrix
- A job that turns out to do nothing but output a copy of the input.
- 25: Power Overwhelming
- Get root on the worker node.
- 26: Replicant
- A job that submits other jobs.
- 27: Someone Set Us Up The Bomb
- A job that forkbombs.
- 28: +1 Histogram of Hopeful Significance
- Re-run at least 100 jobs to produce one extra histogram.
- 29: Fine Tuning Problem
- Re-run at least 100 jobs to change one integer or float parameter.
- 30: We Have To Go Deeper
- Run a job that is itself a VM on a site using VMs.
- 31: Sightseer
- Successfully run jobs at 50 different sites.
- 32: Most Favoured Nation
- A job submitted without restriction runs entirely within one country.
- 33: Love Handles
- Run out of file descriptors.
- 34: False Advertising
- Jobs die trying to find data a site claims it has.
- 35: We Are Legion
- Have 1000 jobs running concurrently.
- 36: Not A Big Truck But A Series Of Tubes
- A job that succeeds but times out trying to stage out the results.
- 37: FYI I Am A Spy
- Run as someone else's VO.
- 38: Skynet By Any Other Name
- Use the grid to plan your next move in Risk.
- 39: Limbo
- Accomplish nothing between submitting jobs and receiving their output.
- 40: Alt-Tab Master
- Gain at least one level between submitting jobs and receiving their output.
- 41: Ludicrous Speed
- Jobs that really do complete successfully in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
- 42: Pseudorapidity
- Jobs that really do complete successfully in the time it takes to drink coffee in R1 in the summer.
- 43: Strata
- Forget to change the stage-out location and overwrite old but needed results.
- 44: M-M-M-Monster Kill
- Successfully kill at least 100 jobs.
- 45: Geneva Convention
- Successfully kill at least 1000 jobs.
- 46: Duke Nukem Forever
- A job that claims to still be alive a month after submission.
- 47: Local Gauge Invariance
- A bug that manifests itself only when run remotely.
- 48: Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
- A job that produces different results when run twice.
- 49: Cold War
- Submit jobs from the US to Russia, or vice-versa.
- 50: Krasniy Oktyabr
- Actually get any jobs back from Russia.
- 51: Trust Your Feelings
- Submit a job using a freshly-compiled binary you haven't tested locally.
- 52: Scott of the Antarctic
- A job that runs completely and then dies trying to save the output.
- 53: Dark Matter
- A job that disappears without trace.
- 54: For Your Eyes Only
- A job that fails because of badly configured file permissions.
- 55: The Only Winning Move
- Run a grid jobs without directly using or dynamically linking to ROOT at any time.
- 56: The House Always Wins
- Generate at least a million events of Monte-Carlo without the appropriate process turned on.
- 57: Lambda Complex
- Plot the completion times of your jobs and calculate their half-life.
- 58: Higgs Mass Correction
- A job that gets trapped in an infinite loop.
- 59: Parity Violation
- A job that returns corrupted data.