Sanity Tool: Lightweight Diagnostics For Individual User Accounts On Supercomputer Systems

It can be troublesome and challenging to diagnose and resolve problems caused by improper individual user account configurations on supercomputer systems. To assist individual users and those who support them in handling these issues efficiently and conveniently, we designed and created a new lightweight system utility named Sanity Tool. Sanity Tool includes a group of generic and machine-specific tests that are used to evaluate the correctness of a user's account configurations. It has played an important role in user support since its emergence on supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This tool can also be installed on almost any supercomputer system effortlessly, and it can be extended with customized site-specific tests with a reasonable amount of work.