PoD 2.1.2

It is my pleasure to announce the release of PoD 2.1.2.

Some Highlights of this release

• Now PoD officially supports AFS. You can install PoD at CERN. See "PoD at CERN’s AFS".
• It is very important to mention, that the code of PoD's LSF plug-in got a lot of improvements. It is now smarter, faster, and, most importantly, LSF and resource friendly.
• Now users can configure whether to receive LSF jobs' std/err output via emails or files (files - by default). It's configurable in PoD user defaults ($POD_LOCATION/etc/PoD.cfg). Only for the LSF plug-in.
• Now user can configure whether PoD workers should upload log files at the end of the session or not (not - by default). It's configurable in PoD user defaults ($POD_LOCATION/etc/PoD.cfg). Only for the LSF plug-in.
• Now users can define $ROOTSYS as a ROOT version for workers. Workers will use that version of ROOT, which is defined on a PoD server machine (in case of shared home) or WN will use any version defined on it under $ROOTSYS. It's configurable in PoD user defaults ($POD_LOCATION/etc/PoD.cfg), see worker.my_rootsys. Now it is a default value.
• GUI (pod-console) now can detect that there is no user activity. And if it lasts for 15 minutes, it switches all sensors automatically off and shows an information message. This prevents unnecessary system usage when pod-console is left without a user attention.

+ a lot more visible and internal changes...

To find out all changes, which where introduced in this version, please, meet our web site

or

follow the direct link to ReleaseNotes.

Actually you find all needed information on http://pod.gsi.de

PoD works out of the box! Most users won't even need to know the location of PoD user defaults - configuration file ;)

Since 2.1.2 contains important changes, including security fixes, it is very much recommended to start your next dynamic PROOF session with PoD 2.1.2.

BTW, it is about one month since GSI (Darmstadt) switched to a dynamic PROOF cluster using PoD, instead of a static one.

PoD is a toolset, which helps to unleash another powerful side of such a great product like PROOF.

In case of any problem or questions on this version please immediately contact to A.Manafov@gsi.de

You feedback will be always appreciated. The development of PoD is only driven by your feedback!

pod.gsi.de

Today PoD became a bit closer to users ;)

I've just got a dedicated PoD domain: pod.gsi.de

The site isn't complete yet, but has already more than enough information to start to play with PoD.

From now on only POD.GSI.DE should be the entry point for all PoD users.

PoD 2.1.1 on AFS

Yesterday, PoD has been tested at CERN.

We used PoD 2.1.1 and LSF plug-in. The LSF plug-in so-far only supports a shared file system on LSF, the installation therefore was done on AFS.

So, as it was expected ;) PoD worked out of the box! We submitted about 30 jobs. The start-up time for LSF jobs was very vast. I think we got all our workers within 20 seconds.

Now I can confirm, PoD (with LSF plug-in) has been officially tested at CERN.

The only problem we faced was the restriction of AFS.

New version of PoD creates a named-pipe - it is used in the latest thread pool algorithm of PoD. Unfortunately we found out that AFS doesn't support pipes:

Subject: 2.13  Can I create a fifo (aka named pipe) in /afs?

No. AFS does not support "mknod fifofile p".

It is actually very simple to fix in PoD. The patch is already in development and will be released very soon.

Have a nice day!

ALICE Offline week

Anar here ...

This week I gave a PoD presentation on the ALICE offline week.

My slides you can find here ;)

If everything goes as planned, PoD will take place of GSI's static PROOF cluster and will be used on daly basis as a default way of processing PROOF analysis. At least we are going in that direction currently.

Will keep you posting on this one...

PoD 2.1.1

Finally a new version of PoD has been released.

This time PoD got lots of improvements and most of all the pod-agent - a core module, has been upgraded and now made a use of the thread pool pattern. This gives a much smaller virtual memory footprint and also improves the performance by a huge factor in a network intensive operations (such as a file list validation when thousands of files are in the list and a merging) when many worker nods are used.

All users are kindly asked to stop using all prevues versions of PoD, including betas and move to v2.1.1.

The first reason is that this version is a factor of 10 faster in network intensive operations (like file validation and merging) and a virt. memory footprint of it is now reduced by a factor of 14 in compare to the prevues release + many many more improvements.

The second, since I am the only developer I can't give much support for older versions. So, if you have a problem with PoD the first question would be, "are you using the latest one?"... ;)

BTW, starting from this version, PoD generates a helper header file. The header should help you to automat a PROOF connection string in your scripts.

Read more in user's manual.

There are many more other features added and fixed. You can find more information in the Release Notes.

Find more details on PoD Trac.