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Altair Allocator Administrators Guide
Allocator works in conjunction with license monitoring and workload scheduling solutions such as Monitor and Accelerator.
View Allocation Details
Standalone User Interface
Allocator also provides a standalone graphical user interface that can be run from the shell command line.

Welcome
What's New
View new features for Allocator 2025.1.0.
Allocator Overview
Discover the available Altair Allocator guides.
Allocator Tutorials
Examine the Case Study for a complex Allocator example.
Altair Allocator Administrators Guide
Allocator works in conjunction with license monitoring and workload scheduling solutions such as Monitor and Accelerator.
- Introduction
  Allocator works in conjunction with license monitoring and workload scheduling solutions such as Monitor and Accelerator.
- Start, Stop and Monitor Allocator
- Sharing Licenses Across Multiple Sites
- Configure Allocator
  To configure Allocator, you need to create a file called config.tcl. This is the only file required for configuring Allocator.
- Allocator Procedures
  In this section, the procedures that may be used in the Allocator configuration file are described.
- Procedures Backward Compatibility
  The previous section described the procedures that may be used in the Allocator configuration file. The new procedures are under the Tcl namespace LA; they should be prefixed with LA::
- Allocator Usage Examples
  This section contains simple examples about using Allocator to solve common problems of sharing licenses between sites.
- Map Host Names
  In several points in the systems, it is useful to get the host name for a checkout, for a job, for a daemon, etc. Since every machine may be known by different names, it is important to provide the expert user with the ability to map host names to some canonical form of the host name.
- Resource Groups
  The notion of a "resource group" in Allocator is useful when you have a resource that is derived from multiple sources.
- Allocator and TIMEVAR
  To make the weights of Allocator change as a function of time, you can use the procedure TIMEVAR.
- Passive Mode
- License Overbooking
- Overbooking in Allocator
- Debugging
- View Allocation Details
  - Web Interface
    The primary access to Allocator is through its web browser interace.
  - Standalone User Interface
    Allocator also provides a standalone graphical user interface that can be run from the shell command line.
  - Command Shell Output
    Allocations made by Allocator and other details related to the allocation can be viewed on the command line of a shell where the Allocator project has been enabled.
  - Failover Server Candidates
    If a server crashes suddenly, VOV has the capability to start a replacement server on a pre-selected host. This capability requires that the pre-selected host is configured as a failover server.
- Multiple Queues
- PBS and Other Queues
  Allocator can allocate licenses across multiple schedulers, including Accelerator queues, PBS clusters and others. In this section we discuss how to integrate Allocator and PBS.

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Standalone User Interface

Allocator also provides a standalone graphical user interface that can be run from the shell command line.

Please note, this is a limited GUI which can show details of only one resource at a time. For full UI functionality, it is recommended to use the browser interface, described in an earlier section.

In a shell, use the command:

vovla_gui -r <RESOURCE_NAME>

This standalone GUI will display four time plots for the specificied resource for each site:

Running
Queued
Allocated
Uncertain

Figure 1.

Note: Each site uses a different color to distinguish it from other sites. However, the chosen color for any site is the same across all four plots. For any of the plots, you can hide the plots for one or more sites by clicking on the site nickname(s) in the left column.

On the right side of the screen, you can see the average value for each plot as well as the last value.

The plots shown here auto-refresh every 10 seconds by default. You can choose the "update" interval by clicking the update button in the top right and selecting the desired refresh rate from the drop-down menu.

You can also choose the time range to display in these plots by clicking the interval button and choosing the desired time range from the drop menu.