Monday, July 29, 2013

CCTools 4.0 Released

The Cooperative Computing Lab is pleased to announce the release of version 4.0 of the Cooperative Computing Tools, including Parrot, Chirp, Makeflow, WorkQueue, SAND, All-Pairs, and other software.

This is the first release of the 4.0 series, with some major changes:
  • To support new features on WorkQueue, backwards compatibility of master and workers pre-4.0 is broken. Specifically, workers from 4.0 cannot connect to masters pre-4.0, and masters from 4.0 will not accept connection from workers pre-4.0. The API did not change, thus unless you want to take advantage of new features, you should not need to modify your code.

  • All code related to WorkQueue has been consolidated to its own library. When linking work queue applications in C, you will need to use: -lwork_queue -ldttools rather than just -ldttools. If you are using the perl or python bindings, no change is necessary.

  • The auto-mode option -a for communicating with the catalog server is being deprecated. It is now implied when a master, or project name (-M, -N) is specified.

  • Most tools now support long options at the command line (e.g., --help).
Highlights:

  • [WorkQueue] Support for workers hierarchies, with a master-foremen-workers paradigm. [Michael Albrecht]
  • [WorkQueue] Multi-slot workers. A worker now is able to handle more than one task at a time. [Michael Albrecht]
  • [WorkQueue] Resource reports. A worker reports its resources (disk, memory, and cpu) to the master, and each task in the master can specify a minimum of such resources. [Michael Albrecht, DeVonte Applewhite]
  • [WorkQueue] Authentication between master and workers when using the catalog server [Douglas Thain].
  • [WorkQueue] Python bindings now include most C API. [Dinesh Rajan]
  • [WorkQueue] Several bug fixes and code reorganization. [Dinesh Rajan, Michael Albrecht]
  • [WorkQueue] Policies can be specified to work_queue_pool to submit workers on demand. [Li Yu]
  • [Makeflow] Support for task categories. A rule can be labeled with a category, and required computational resources (disk, memory, and cpu) can be specified per category. Makeflow then automatically communicates these requirements to work queue or condor. [Ben Tovar]
  • [Parrot/Chirp] Support for a search system call added. Search allows for finding files in a number of directories with a shell pattern. See parrot_search for more information. [Patrick Donnelly, Brenden Kokoszka]
  • [Parrot] Several bug fixes for cvmfs support. [Douglas Thain, Ben Tovar, Patrick Donnelly]
  • [Monitor] A resource monitor/watchdog for computational resources (e.g. disk, memory, cpu, and io) that can be used standalone, or automatically by Makeflow and Work Queue. [Ben Tovar]
  • [Monitor] A visualizer that builds a webpage to show the resources histograms from the reports of the resource monitor. [Casey Robinson]


Please refer to the doc/ directory in the distribution for the usage of this new features. You can download the software here:
Download




Thanks goes to the contributors for this release: Michael Albrecht, DeVonte Applewhite, Peter Bui, Patrick Donnelly, Brenden Kokoszka, Kyle Mulholland, Francesco Prelz, Dinesh Rajan, Casey Robinson, Peter Sempolinski, Douglas Thain, Ben Tovar, and Li Yu.