At long last, I am pleased to announce the final release of
cobalt-0.97.0. This release has a large number of new features over
cobalt-0.96.X, including:
* Queue scheduling policies are now setup using cqadm
config file settings are no longer respected
* Reservations now create a queue; users can submit directly to
this queue to prevent off-reservation execution
* Added a new "high-prio" queue scheduling policy that preempts
all other job startups
* bridge api python bindings
* Added bgctl utility (like sysctl using the bridge api)
* Added the bgl simulator (brooklyn)
* Gram support
* Spruce support
* Added post-job scripts
* Submit filters
* Modifiable reservations
* Time-variable queue states (ie queues that are enabled between
4-6pm, but disabled the rest of the time)
This release has been the result of a lot of work from a number of
people. Theron has written large amounts of the code and
documentation. Jason Cope has written the GRAM support, and all of the
supporting documentation. Andrew Cherry has written a few patches,
particularly adding new features in the simulator. The folks here at
ANL, at NCAR/Colorado, and Renci have provided a lot of valuable
testing and feedback; this release would not have been nearly as
robust without their hard work.
I will be laying out the near-term roadmap in the next few days. Much
of the work will focus on better integration with the Blue Gene
platform, both for currently existing versions and the
not-yet-publicly-named-successor ;)
Also, this release includes a useful script called bgctl. This utility
is an analogue to sysctl, but uses the bridge api to read and write
object parameters for both partitions and jobs. This script is an
early example of what can be done with some of the new libraries
included in this release. The only caveat with this utility is the
need for a 64-bit python and ctypes. The shared library shipped with
the BG/L drivers, hence it can only be dlopened from a 64-bit elf
executable. A manual build of python-2.5.1 contains all of the needed
libraries, and a build of it with CC='gcc -m64' will result the right
sort of interpreter for the bridge bindings.
As always, problems can be reported either via trac or on the mailing
list.
-nld
