[gold-users] Announcing Gold 2.2
Scott Jackson
scottmo at adaptivecomputing.com
Fri Jul 2 13:06:20 MDT 2010
Adaptive Computing has just released Gold version 2.2. It is available
for download and has pdf documentation available at
http://www.clusterresources.com/gold.
Here is a text version of the Release Notes for Gold 2.2:
Release Notes
Gold Allocation Manager
Version 2.2.0
Copyright (c) 2010 Adaptive Computing
This document provides an overview of the changes made in a minor release
of Gold Allocation Manager. A minor release will generally include new
functionality and features that can break compatibility with previous
versions. See the Migration section for migration procedures.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Overview
This release of Gold Allocation Manager features enhanced charge rate
types that give more flexibility in the way charges can be calculated.
Other changes were made to allow for better support of incremental
charging and cost determination. Command-line clients were added that aid
in the importing and manipulation of job records.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
New Features
The following is a list of new features added in this release.
* Additional Charge Rate Types - This release added a new Instance
field
to the ChargeRate object in support of an expanded set of charge rate
types (See the chapter on Managing Charge Rates in the Gold User's
Guide for details). The following new charge rate types replace the
former types (Resource, Usage, Multiplier, other):
* VBR - Value Based Resource (formerly Resource) [These charge
rates define how much it costs per unit of time to use a
consumable resource like processors, memory or a telescope,
etc.]
* NBR - Name Based Resource [These charge rates define how much it
costs per unit of time to use a named resource such as
license=matlab, etc.]
* VBU - Value Based Usage (formerly Usage) [These charge rates
define how much it costs for total resource usage such as
cputime, power consumed, generic resources or licenses that are
charged flat fees per use, and which will be subject to
multiplier charge rates.]
* NBU - Name Based Usage [These charge rates define how much it
costs to use a named attribute having a flat charge such as
feature=black, and which will be subject to multiplier charge
rates.]
* VBM - Value Based Multiplier (formerly Multiplier) [These are
scaled multipliers which apply a multiplicative charge factor
based on a numeric scaling factor (such as Discount=.8).]
* NBM - Name Based Multiplier (formerly other) [These are quality
based multipliers which apply a multiplicative charge factor
based on a named quality of the job such as quality of service,
nodetype, queue, user, etc.]
* VBF - Value Based Fee [These charge rates define how much to
charge for scaled or enumerated fees such as setup fees,
shipping
charges, etc. which should be added after the multipliers are
applied.]
* NBF - Name Based Fee [These charge rates define how much it
costs
to use a named attribute having a flat charge such as feature,
etc. which should be added after the multipliers are applied.]
* <other> - Multi-dimensional Value Based Resource [These charge
rates apply a consumable resource cost that varies depending on
the value of a separate named job property.]
* New commands to import and manipulate job records - Three new command
line clients have been added to import and manipulate job records:
* gmkjob - Import or create a new job record
* gchjob - Modify a job record
* grmjob - Delete a job record
* Distinction between charge properties and job properties - Prior to
Gold 2.2, WallDuration, StartTime, EndTime and Description options
specified to gcharge, greserve and gquote were taken as both charge
and job properties, making it difficult to support incremental
charging. In Gold 2.2, these properties have now been disambiguated.
The duration, starttime, endtime and description for the charge will
be passed via the standard options (-t, -s, -e, -d) while the same
properties for the job (duration, starttime, endtime and description)
can be passed in separately using the extension option (i.e. -X
WallDuration=1234). See the man pages for gcharge, greserve and
gquote
for additional details.
* CostOnly Quote Option - A job quote now supports a new costOnly
option
which will return a cost estimate without performing balance checking
or other qualifying validation. This is useful if you would like to
know how much something would cost, but you are not interested in
establishing that a user has an allocation, or belongs to a specified
project, etc.
* Improved Client Performance - The gold server was modified to preload
the utf8 module (instead of doing so after the fork for each
individual client request). This has been shown to give an 10-20%
speedup for common scheduler action command invocations. This
improvement is also available in the gold 2.1.12.2 fix release.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Migration Procedures
The following recommendations should assist you in migrating from an
existing Gold 2.1 installation to a new Gold 2.2 installation.
* Default prefix changed to /opt/gold - In Gold 2.2, the default Gold
installation location has been changed to /opt/gold (from
/usr/local/gold). Thus, if you were previously running ./configure
without the -prefix option to install Gold into /usr/local/gold, when
upgrading to Gold 2.2 you will need to explicitly specify your
location now with ./configure -prefix=/usr/local/gold in order to
have
Gold installed in the same place.
* Database migration script - Run the test/bank_2.1_to_2.2.pl script to
migrate your Gold 2.1 database to the new Gold 2.2 format. It will
perform the following steps:
* Add a Job Stage Value of Create and add Job Create as a
Scheduler
Role Action
* Create new ChargeRate and QuotationChargeRate Instance
Attributes
* Translate Existing ChargeRates to new format (VBR, NBU, etc.)
* Scheduler action commands now use gold_job_id as default argument -
The optionless argument in gquote, greserve and gcharge has been
changed to Id ([-j] <gold_job_id>) instead of JobId (-J <job_id>)
which now must be use an explicit -J flag. In Gold 2.1 and earlier,
gcharge 123 has been interpreted to mean a charge against the
resource
manager job id 123. As of Gold 2.2, gcharge 123 will be
interpreted to
mean a charge against the gold job id 123. Any scripts (such as a
prolog or epilog) which make use of these commands should be modified
accordingly.
* Disambiguation of charge and job properties in scheduler action
commands - In Gold 2.2, in order to better support incremental
charging, the duration, starttime, endtime and description for the
charge will be passed via the standard options (-t, -s, -e, -d) while
the same properties for the job (duration, starttime, endtime and
description) may be passed in separately using the extension option
(i.e. -X WallDuration=1234). If you are are using prolog and epilog
scripts to invoke greserve and gcharge, and you are charging for the
entire job (not incremental charging), then if you were using gcharge
-t 1234 -s "2010-07-01 12:00:00" -e "2010-07-01 12:20:34", in
Gold 2.2
you would have to use gcharge -t 1234 -X WallDuration=1234 -X
StartTime="2010-07-01 12:00:00" -X EndTime="2010-07-01 12:20:34" to
accomplish similar results (the -t option would be used in the charge
calculation to determine cost, while the -X options would be sent in
as job metadata for the job accounting records).
Scott Jackson
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