2021.1.0 Release Notes

New Features and Enhancements

The following new features and enhancements were introduced this software release:

Table 1.
Product Issue Number Case Number Description
All VOV-9454 23741 Most of the VOV Tcl files from the installation package now contain the proper Altair copyright statement and version number.
All VOV-12801 Introduce the new "tasker" lexicon for Accelerator product environment variables. Environment variable names containing old term "SLAVE" will get new names containing "TASKER" in the place of "SLAVE". The old environment variable name will be honored unless the new name is being used. This compatibility measure will ease the transition for administrators.
All VOV-12797 New Tcl VTK function names are added to move to the new "tasker" lexicon. Old VTK function names containing the string "slave" are deprecated, and new VTK function names containing the string "tasker" are added and should be transitioned to from this release forward.
All VOV-9297 Support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 has been added to the Altair Accelerator products.
All VOV-12111 Support for CentOS and RHEL 8 has been added to the Altair Accelerator products.
All VOV-13321 Support for Ubuntu 14.04 has been dropped.
All VOV-13306 This release discontinues support for the SLES 11 operating system.
All VOV-13127 All references to the term "slave" have been replaced with the new term "tasker" throughout the online help documentation.
Accelerator VOV-12708 A REST API guide and tutorial document is added to the Accelerator documentation bookshelf reader.
Accelerator VOV-12537 SlaveLists are deprecated and replaced with TaskerLists with the following additional functionality:
  • The Taskerlists now contain the tasker names instead of only NC-internal IDs. As a result, the taskerlist does not have te be recreated when a tasker is stopped and then restarted, as had been the case with slavelists in previous releases.
  • The TaskerLists definition will be stored in the PR so they will survive vovserver stop-and-restart sequences.
  • Added support for resource 'TaskerList:XXX' in nc run
  • SlaveList:XXX' resources will be automatically replaced by 'TaskerList:XXX' resources.
Accelerator VOV-12458 Implemented "Dialpad" or "Waffle" menu for mobile screens and at high zoom levels on the dashboard UI page.
Accelerator VOV-12743 Implemented Subsets table in Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-12747 An actions dropdown menu has been added, enabling the actions (delete, run with priority) to be performed on selected jobs. Added a search bar, allowing the user to filter the jobs by entering search strings.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-12150 The documentation shown by "ncmgr start -h" is expanded to explain some additional features that require an Accelerator queue to have the webport enabled. In the 2020.1.0 release, the following new features require the webport: 1) REST v3 API and 2) the new administrator dashboard UI page.
Accelerator VOV-12964 Fixed CSS issues in bulk actions drop down.
Accelerator VOV-12812 Enabled client activity logging for nc cmd commands.
Accelerator VOV-12744 Added a Details section for the selected set in the Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-12739 Added UI functionality in the Dashboard > Set Browser screen. Users can now perform actions like retrace, and delete on sets, and also filter the displayed list of sets by text string.
Accelerator VOV-12460 Added NC queue color to the dashboard user interface.
Accelerator VOV-12762 Implemented storybooks for the Table component user interface.
Accelerator VOV-9778 23068, 23767, 23914, 24923 Irrelevant alerts are no longer generated. Addressed some implementation issues with vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags. Note that calls to vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags are cumulative and override any tags added with vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all. The -noooq parameter for vtk_flexlm_monitor has no impact at present, please use vovresSetFlags instead. The -order parameter to vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all only orders any specified tags, it no longer adds tags (use -tags to add tags). The optional parameters vovResource, vovMap to vtk_flexlm_monitor are now handled correctly.
Accelerator VOV-12277 A new command option for nc run has been added called -dpinitialport N which allows the user to specify the starting port that partialTool will use to find an open port to communicate among the subtasks in the cohort. This will be reflected in a new job property named DP_INITIAL_PORT that can be observed being set on the job.
Accelerator VOV-12736 The React dashboard has now implemented a Sets List view.
Accelerator VOV-12742 Implemented Jobs table in Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-13292 Two new server configuration parameters have been added: http.workerthreads and http.proxytimeout. http.workerthreads specifies the number of worker threads that the new REST HTTP server will start when vovserver starts with a valid webport. http.proxytimeout enables you to specify the timeout in seconds, used when the main webserver forwards some requests, like CGI pages, to the older http server listening on the VOV port.
Accelerator VOV-11930 CS0120821 A new command line parameter was added for nc run for dp jobs called -nocohortwait. This instructs partialTool for each cohort task to finish when its subtask process has finished rather than wait for the primary job to complete (which is the default behavior). Passing -nochortwait to nc run sets a new property named DP_COHORTWAIT to 0. By default, this is set to 1 when -nocohortwait is not passed, and partialTool will behave like it always has.
Accelerator, FlowTracer, Monitor VOV-10198 Add support for Windows Server 2019.
Accelerator VOV-12947 Added breadcrumb navigation to the Sets page, through which the user can navigate to the hierarchical sets.
Accelerator VOV-12452 Add a sub-window for scheduler health monitoring and vital signs in the Accelerator admin dashboard web UI.
Accelerator VOV-12733 Support is added for Accelerator on ARM64 systems running Centos 7, Centos 8, or Amazon Linux 2. This support is for execution hosts and submit hosts only. The "armv8" hardware resource name is added for this architecture.
Accelerator Plus VOV-12295 CS0121114
  1. Fixed an issue where the NUMA_AFFINITY property on jobs always showed it as being bound to specific CPUs, even though it was bound to the entire NUMA node.
  2. Fixed an issue where WX vovtaskers were overriding the affinity set by the NC vovtasker, causing WX jobs to be bound to only a subset of the available CPUs.
FlowTracer VOV-12556 Add support for FlowTracer on Windows.
Hero VOV-12891 Added a -P <NAME=VALUE> parameter to the hero submit command (similar to the NC -P parameter).
Hero VOV-12932 Added the -modules, -stagein, -stageout parameters to the hero -zebu submit command. The DeclareEmulator specification now includes the following parameters: -type (for future use), -environment, z-ebu_system_dir, -zebu_root. The commands specified in the -stagein, -stageout parameters depend on the resources Limit:zebu_stagein_load, Limit:zebu_stageout_load.
Monitor VOV-5671 The vtk_feature_add_or_create API now expects an additional parameter for the associated ISV string. See the documentation for the new syntax. The vtk_featureuser_* APIs have had their names changed to vtk_checkout_*. The old vtk_featureuser_* names are still supported but vtk_checkout_* will be the official documented names.
Accelerator VOV-6572 This should be fixed as a side effect of implementing the mutator API. See release notes for VOV-8899.
All VOV-9298 Support for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 is added.
All VOV-13364 Starting with the 2021.1.0 release, the Accelerator Products images come with digitally signed certificates that can be used to reliably confirm authenticity of the installation media images.

Resolved Issues

The following issues were resolved in this release.

Table 2.
Product Issue Number Case Number Description
All VOV-13252 Web server improvements (when the web port is configured as non-zero):
  1. Added the following headers to all HTTP responses:
    • Strict-Transport-Security
    • X-Frame-Options
    • X-Xss-Protection
    • X-Content-Type-Options
    • X-Content-Security-Policy
    • Content-Security-Policy
  2. Added support for web ports higher than 32000.
All VOV-13181 Some stability improvements were made in the Webserver code to avoid potential crashes of vovserver.
All VOV-12989 CS0145649 Fixed an issue where stopping more than 1 vovtasker by name (vovtaskermgr stop <tasker1> <tasker2>...) was renaming only the last named tasker to <taskername>_stopped_<timestamp>.
All VOV-9560 23740 Fixed an issue with vovnotifyd using only the first RAM value for jobs with multiple RAM requests (e.g.: -r+ RAM/100 -r+ RAM/200) to determine if the job is exceeding requested RAM usage (health check of requested RAM).
Accelerator VOV-11388 25153 Fixed an issue with the vovserver failing to start when epoll is enabled (set config(useepoll) 1) in policy.tcl.
All VOV-12582 The vovtaskermgr start command will now only utilize the configured rshcmd (one of: inetd/rsh/ssh/vovtsd) for starting remote taskers. Prior to this change, the inetd method was always attempted, and the vovtsd method would be attempted if the configured vovtsd port was non-zero.
All VOV-12512 All references to PBS Works support have been updated to direct the user to the new Altair One website.
All VOV-6287 20738 Fixed the issue in the error message "too many elements in array" where the max array was not getting updated as per the config(maxJobArray).
All VOV-13247 Network security testing port scans had in certain cases caused vovserver to hang up in an infinite loop.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus, Monitor VOV-13009 CS0133888 In the help information displayed by nc cmd vovdaemonmgr -h, a note was added indicating that the -f (force) option applies only to the start subcommand, and only when a daemon list is specified.
Accelerator VOV-12418 CS0121215 By default, interactive jobs will also write to a logfile just like normal jobs do. You can also specify the log file with the -l parameter to nc run like normal jobs. If you do not want an interactive job to write to the log file, use -nolog as a parameter to nc run
Accelerator VOV-12135 The axis labels in the jobs histogram in the dashboard UI page showed repeated "1" labels with a small number of running or queueed jobs.
Accelerator VOV-13000 CS0128274 Fixed an issue where incrementing grabbed resources was not incrementing the count of used resources in some cases.
Accelerator VOV-13039 CS0146315 The network data sent as a result of nc info was made more compact, which will make running the command more efficient.
Accelerator VOV-13113 Fixed CSS issues in Set Browser page.
Accelerator VOV-13026 CS0149221 Handle window/weight inheritance for new FairShare groups that are being created during job submission. The window will be inherited from the parent. Both the window and weight will be inherited from a sibling group named "default".
Accelerator VOV-12714 Fixed the following issues with job container support:
  1. The VOV_CONTAINER_<resource> (where <resource> is CORES, RAM, or TMP) environment variable was not being set in the hook environments for containers that were configured to use the job's resource specification as container limits.
  2. The VOV_CONTAINER_JOB_RUNDIR environment variable was not being set in the hook environments if the job's run directory had been configured as an equivalence, as would be the case for jobs submitted from within the user's home directory.
Accelerator VOV-13108 As per the new API response, changes made to the footer version text.
Accelerator VOV-13272 Increased virtual memory limit for nc run.
Accelerator, FlowTracer VOV-12908 The Accelerator new dashboard UI for administrators, when accessed, will increase the vovserver memory "Size" metric printed by the vsi command. The large reported memory size is virtual memory address space size, with only modest associated increase in actual memory usage. The number of worker threads used by the web server can be controlled with config(http.workerthreads) N in policy.tcl. Changing this value will require a vovserver restart, because it can only be set once before the multithreaded webserver is initialized. Also, a timeout value for when the multi-threaded webserver has to delegate some requests, such as CGI pages, to the old vovserver web server, can be configured by setting config(http.proxytimeout). This value can be changed at any time.
Accelerator VOV-12977 CS0143428 Fixed an issue with interactive jobs (nc run -I) failing with the error message "Job has problems with PTY. Bad pipes".
Accelerator VOV-12811 CS0129987 vtk_resourcemap_set now requires that the user either own the resource, or the user have ADMIN security rights for it to take effect.
Accelerator VOV-10921 24781, 24803 To better clarify jobs that have been queued due to reserved taskers, additional information has been added to the output of the nc why command. Under the "Per-slave/per-tasker analysis" section, a count of taskers that would have been compatible but are reserved will be shown as: 'n is currently reserved by others'
Accelerator VOV-5980 21105 The nc modify command has been modified to exit with a status of 1 if any part of the modification request fails.
Accelerator VOV-12892 With certain types of product install methods, the Accelerator documentation bookshelf link in the Web UI had not been functional. This only impacted customers who download and un-tar both common.tar and win64.tar with the intent of installing both linux64 and win64 into the same master installation directory. The workaround was to un-tar and install win64 first, then go back and un-tar common.tar and linux64.tar, and then install linux64 only. If you had an existing installation the workaround was to un-tar common.tar and reinstall linux64 only.
Accelerator VOV-12547 Fixed an issue with the -Il option for interactive jobs that prevented the user from typing in the terminal window and interacting with the job.
Accelerator VOV-11452 Added -orphanreservations option to the vovforget command for forgetting the reservations not attached to any tasker. Behaviour is modified to allow overlapping reservation in the system, but it will never be in effect unless the dominant reservation is deleted. Fixed an issue where the tasker reservation gets duplicated after server restart. Also, changed the tasker instance reservation (created using vtk_tasker_define (-reserve option) or by passing the -e option to vovtasker) to be non-persistent by default. No change in behavior for tasker reservations created using vtk_reservation_create.
Accelerator VOV-11662 29869 Fixed "no such variable 'killTimePP'" alerts when health checks are enabled for stuck jobs with -stuckKillTime.
Accelerator VOV-9254 23430 Fixed issue that prevented child FairShare groups from being displayed when viewing the top-level group via vovfsgroup show.
Accelerator VOV-11261 Addressed issue where delays were encountered due to vovserver not being immediately notified of an update.
Accelerator VOV-7490 20070, 24363 Fixed an issue leading to "URGENT vovnotifyd Cannot send mail. can't read "code": no such variable" alerts. Reduced the severity to WARN, in case of failures to send mail. Also, added an alert if the list of recipients for notification emails is empty.
Accelerator VOV-12464 CS0122942 Requests for CGROUP:RAM with more than 1 RAM specification will now limit RAM usage to the total amount requested by all RAM specifications rather than the last one.  For example the command: nc run -r CGROUP:RAM RAM/60 RAM/40 -- sleep 0 will limit ram usage to 100 megabytes rather than 40.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13030 CS0149277 Fixed an issue with Ctrl-C not working as expected with interactive jobs (nc run -I/-Il/-Ir).
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus, FlowTracer VOV-4998 CS0143832 For all products, strict job name checking has been enabled and invalid job name characters will cause an error. For Accelerator and Accelerator Plus, this can be overridden by putting the following in $VOVDIR/local/vncrun.config.tcl 
set ::jobname_lexicon legacy
or 
set ::jobname_lexicon replace
Legacy will use the more lax job naming rules from earlier releases. Replace will identify invalid characters in the job name, replace them with "_", and issue a warning to the console An issue with vsm being enabled to handle some invalid job name characters was addressed.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13051 CS0121039 Fixed an issue with interactive jobs (nc run -I) failing with error messages similar to "Error=98: Address already in use [vovttyserver2:244]" and "FATAL ERROR: Cannot open PTY port (with remote signal handling): Cannot open pty server sockets [vncrun.tcl:2257]". This is accompanied by job errors similar to "Cannot connect to PTY server on submission host lava1 13316 Z@:x=XGa56cT_Hd6 from lava5".
Accelerator VOV-12519 For consistency across CLI and web UI, the default values for the following VovPremptRule options have changed in some cases from previous versions.
  • The option -resumedelay default is now 5 seconds previously the CLI default was 10 seconds.
  • The default pool name is now mainpool, previously the web UI default was MainPool.
  • The default for -mqthresh is now 0.1=10%, before the web UI default was 0.01.
  • The -killage option default is now 60, previous version of the web UI had a default of 0.
  • For -skipresumedjob option default is 120, previous versions of the web UI had a default of 0.
  • For -preemptslavenum new default will always be 1, some variants of CLI had a default value of 2 previously.
Accelerator VOV-10558 23924 Empty job class sets are not deleted, thereby preserving all properties for future submissions.
Accelerator VOV-12807 When you hover the mouse over the job graph line in the dashboard UI window, a small pop-up displays the Y unit, the Y number, and a time. The Y number is actually an average over a surrounding time window, and not an instantaneous value as implied by the information shown.
Accelerator VOV-13169 When vovserver was configured with webport and failover was configured, it was found that vovserver could lose access to the webport and get restarted with the webport disabled. This has been fixed. Also, if Accelerator was configured to use License Monitor, it was observed that failover could leave an extra copy of the voveventmon process launched by vovresourced running every time vovserver crashes and restarted. vovresourced has been modified to properly shut down voveventmon in the case where vovserver has crashed.
Accelerator VOV-13036 Fixed a server crash caused by memory corruption when running queries from a 2016.09 client.
Allocator VOV-10997 CS0156459 Suppressed the log, "Could not add FTResJob...", as it is not impacting the functionality.
Allocator VOV-12724 CS0130000 Fixed issues with the allocation of resource groups in Allocator. Prior implementations based the allocation on demand for the component resources only. The new implementation bases the allocation on demand for the resource group and all of its component resources.
Allocator VOV-11883 CS0120726 Fixed issue when the same feature serviced by different daemons with different tags which makes -ExcludeTagRx ignored.
Allocator VOV-11894 CS0120781 Fixed CSV export of the Home > Overview and Home > Resources > Matches tabular reports.
Allocator VOV-11224 24981 Fixed an issue with Allocator showing incorrect "Distributable" values when 'SetReserverForUser' is used with * (all users).
Allocator VOV-13025 CS0145466 Added a config key MQ(pjProbeKillTimeout) for the maximum time that the vovlad daemon should wait for existing probes to be killed at startup.
FlowTracer VOV-7956 21595 Addressed issue that prevented alert text from being displayed in the vovconsole alerts window.
FlowTracer VOV-12960 CS0143848 Fixed issue with keyword substitution for array job submissions that caused arbitrary matches to the array reference job's ID and IDINT values to be substituted with the ID and IDINT values from the individual array jobs in the job metadata. For example, an array job submission of "echo 000001070" where the reference job was coincidentally job 1070 would result in the command being changed in each individual array job to reflect its own ID, such as "echo 000001072" for job 1, "echo 000001074" for job 2, and so on.
FlowTracer VOV-12815 CS0137268 Evaluation of resources when used with an indirect tasker (taskerVNC) now applies the jobclass followed by the resource list which is the opposite of what was done previously.
FlowTracer VOV-12203 CS0120999 Re-evaluation of a job class to compute the union of resources when used with an indirect tasker(taskerVNC) is no longer done. This is typically relevant for FlowTracer integration with either Accelerator (NC) or Accelerator Plus (WX). To restore the old behavior, please contact Altair support.
FlowTracer VOV-12901 Fixed an issue where the user may see PIPELOG related errors in the console on Windows, when running a FlowTracer job directly from the command line, such as : vov cmd.exe /c echo "Hello"
FlowTracer VOV-12918 CS0142609 Improved the behavior of the Taskers > NC Interface: vovwxd vovconsole menu option, which configures and starts the vovwxd daemon. The daemon will be configured to use the default queue name (vnc) unless the NC_QUEUE environment variable is present.
FlowTracer VOV-10189 Schedule priority and execution priority are now saved in the persistent representation.
FlowTracer VOV-12813 CS0137660 systemjob state is now saved in the representation so that it's persistent across FlowTracer restarts.
Hero VOV-12931 Wrapper daemon now runs on the emulator vovtasker associated with the emulator. Previously it ran from wherever the autostart command was executed. Fixed an issue that prevented the command hero -zebu stop_all_wrappers from working correctly in some instances.
Monitor VOV-9774 24058, CS0121121 Fixed problem parsing MathLM licenses when one of HH MM SS time values starts with 08 and 09.
Monitor VOV-12253 CS0120851 Fixed MathLM parser for features with "Sub" and space prefix.
Monitor VOV-12634 CS0126701 Fixed Altair Monitor GUI to correctly show expiration date if one of the licenses expired.
Monitor VOV-12324 CS0121132, 21139 The output format for more recent versions of Sentinel RMS has changed. The new format caused ftlm_parse_sentinel to incorrectly calculate capacity. It now recognizes the new format and only counts instances of capacity appearing inside a feature block. Support for older formats has been retained.
Monitor VOV-9100 23225 Fixed LM report plotting with "Breakdown By Feature" option.