A PROOF cluster in 7 seconds

Anar here...

Can anybody install a PROOF cluster (dynamically, from zero, on requested machines) in 7 seconds?
With PoD anybody can do that!


A bit of propaganda... ;)

I have just finished some small improvements of PoD's SSH plug-in and also decided to give it a bit of propaganda push once again.

Among other changes I made the plug-in a bit faster and also now if a user doesn't request a specific number of PROOF workers for some of the worker nodes, then pod-ssh will automatically setup PROOF workers on that worker node according to a number of CPU cores. It means, that the last parameter in the pod-ssh configuration file is not required anymore and can be left empty.

The screenshot below is just a demonstration of how easy and fast pod-ssh works.

In the demo, I have used the following configuration file:

r1, manafov@lxi020.gsi.de , , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

r2, manafov@lxi021.gsi.de , , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

r3, manafov@lxb333.gsi.de , , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

r4, manafov@lxir036.gsi.de, , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

r5, manafov@lxir037.gsi.de, , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

r6, manafov@lxir038.gsi.de, , /misc/manafov/tmp/test,

#r_32bit, manafov@lxi009.gsi.de, , /misc/manafov/tmp/test, 

in order to use all described machines as my PROOF slaves.

For the sake of demonstration I wrote a simple script, just to show the timestamp of the execution of the all PoD command required to setup a cluster:

There is nothing special in the script, just the usual PoD command sequence:

pod-server start

pod-ssh (in case of SSH. For other RMS plug-ins it is "pod-submit")

and

pod-info

(refer to PoD user's manual for more information)

The screenshot below shows the output of the script:

It took me exactly 7 seconds to 

1. Start a PoD server (PROOF master).

2. Submit PoD jobs to 6 worker nodes using ssh.

3. Setup 44 PROOF workers out of these 6 PoD workers.

These worker nodes are just interactive machines or desktops standing in my institution somewhere. These boxes have no pre-installed PROOF software and are being configured on the fly by PoD.

At night I can count much more machines, which nobody use. With PoD and the SSH plug-in I can make a dynamic PROOF cluster out of them at any time just in seconds :)

If you want to try the latests PoD features, then use the latest beta.