Download statistics

Anar here...

It has been a long time since my last post ;) You know, I was busy with PoD development and stuff.

There are many new features implemented in PoD and I am doing my best to get them all tested and available in the next release of PoD, which I am planning to make in a week or so. In my next posts on this blog I am going to highlight some features. So, please, subscribe for updates or follow me on this blog (on the right you see the followers bar)...

Anyhow this post is not exactly about PoD, but about a PoD web site update. There are some cosmetic changes, and among others I have implemented an automatic publishing of PoD download statistics. It is time, I think, to start to get some statistics (it's better to be early than late). You can check it out here.

So far we have around 130 Downloads since summer 2010. I think it is very good number, since PoD is a specific product for a specific field. 

As you may know or have noticed, pod.gsi.de is a docbook based website. Since long time I am in love with docbook (PoD User's manual http://pod.gsi.de/documentation.html is made in docbook) and even the web site of PoD is also a docbook based. I am using docbook Website schemas and very happy with it. For a docbook Website concept I will dedicate a separate post some time later.

Back to the subject. The stats are generated automatically every night. Since I don't have a direct access to our Web Server and its logs, it was quite tricky to implement.

The whole process is completely automated.

I am getting the log via a script. The stats are parsed by a simple C++ program, which outputs a docbook page. The page is than committed to PoDWebsite Git repo. As soon as the Git repo updated with a new commit, buildbot will automatically start a build of PoDWebsite and if parsing and conversion to html are ok, the site will be published. WoW :) So, simple is that. I love automations!

PoD Download Statistics

PoD 2.2

Anar here...

After several months of development :) I am pleased to announce the release of PoD 2.2!

Highlights of this release

• A major highlight of this release is the first implementation of the PoD with SSH plug-in (see User's Manual, Chapter 11. SSH plug-in).
• The PoD distribution package is even more smaller now, it is only 3 MB :)
• A heavily revised build system, should help users to build and to install PoD from the source code conveniently.
• PoD doesn't use xrootd anymore. Instead xproofd is used. Starting with ROOT version 5.24/00 an executable named xproofd is also available under $ROOTSYS/bin. The xproofd executable is built out of the same main program used to build the xrootd executable. However, it loads by default the XrdProofdProtocol instead of the data-serving protocol XrdXrootdProtocol. The purpose of this daemon is to simplify the configuration when data-serving is not needed or it is handled differently.
• Implemented an automatic execution of a custom (user specified) environment script on workers before PoD processes start. (see User's Manual, section 5.2.)
• Revised PoD workers package and algorithms helped to reduce requirements and decrease start up time.

PoD Home

Release Notes

PROOF Home

PoD 2.1.4

Anar here...

It is always a pleasure to announce a new release of PoD. Yesterday night I have released PoD 2.1.4.

Some Highlights of this release

• A new build system has been introduced. The source code of sub-modules of PoD is now shipped along with the PoD distribution. Now PoD is much more easer to install and to maintain. Please see a how-to-install page in user's manual.
• Now PoD is shipped with a new plug-in. Starting from this release we implemented and will support a PBS/Torque plug-in. This opens a possibility to our users to submit PoD jobs to PBS resource management system. We support PBS (torque) and PBSPro, with both shared and not shared home file systems.
• PoD got a new command line interface (CLI). Using PoD's CLI users will be able to start, stop PoD server, retrieve its status, submit PoD jobs to a different resource management systems, check status and a number of available PoD/PROOF workers and more... Please see PoD user's manual for more details.
• PoD gLite plug-in and glite-api-wrapper library is now supporting gLite UI 3.2.

PoD Home

Release Notes

PROOF Home

PROOF progress dialog window

Yesterday Gerri has implemented a useful patch in PROOF. From the now on it is possible to switch the PROOF progress dialog off.

Add method TProof::SetProgressDialog(Bool_t on = kTRUE) to disable the progress dialog
window while preserving graphics from the final actions in Terminate. This may be useful
when X over network is slow. To disable the dialog the call

proof->SetProgressDialog(0)

has to be placed before Process(...).

Many users, who does PROOF remotely will find this as an extremely handy feature. ;)

The patch was committed as a revision 33562.

TORQUE/PBS plug-in

Anar here...

I've just finished the first stable version of a TORQUE/PBS plug-in for PoD.

One more plug-in which will be shipped by default with PoD distributions, additionally to gLite and LSF.

Worth to mention, that the LSF plug-in is already in production for ALICE users at GSI.

From now on PoD user can also make use of PBS facilities and setup private PROOF clusters on the fly using PoD.

The plug-in will be released with PoD v2.1.4 and currently it is in a beta.

I am looking for test users, who has access to PBS clusters and want help and try/test PoD. Any feedback is appreciated. ;)

If you want to test PoD (with pbs), just drop me an email on A.Manafov@gsi.de.

You can also just download the latest nightly and give it a try. More information here.

BTW, v2.1.4 will also come with a new command line interface. So now finally we have both, GUI and CLI ;)

The next plug-in is already in development - it is SSH plug-in. With help of it, any machine on which you have ssh access can become your PROOF worker on demand. ;)

See you soon...