2023.1.2 Release Notes

New Features

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-14464 Accelerator None Removed PERCENT/1 from the minimum resource requirements for a job. From this release onward, the PERCENT resource will need to be used explicitly to limit the number of jobs running on a Tasker. Jobs will no longer request the PERCENT resource by default. This change allows more than 100 jobs to be run concurrently on a single Tasker.
VOV-14728 Accelerator None Fixed issue which could result in RDS missing some checkin/checkouts that occur during startup and changes in configuration in SWD/resources.cfg.
VOV-14810 Accelerator None Preview feature: Added functionality to deliver Mistral results to Accelerator. We can run a job with the -ioprofile option that generates log file. Visualization is added in the NC GUI for a few of the measured labels from the log file. Below are the steps:
  1. Acquire the Mistral license and place it in $VOVDIR/local as mistral.dat.
  2. Run the command nc run in CLI with the -ioprofile option. For example, nc run -ioprofile <job>. To test this you can run a script that reads/writes to a file.
  3. In your working directory, the Mistral log file should be generated inside the vnc_logs/<current date> folder
  4. Run the command nc gui -ioprofile<jobId> in CLI to get graphical view of the log data. You can also achieve this by running nc gui, right clicking on your job and clicking on View Mistral Profile.
VOV-15253 Accelerator Plus CS0351320 Multiple "Deleting failed tasker" alerts now increases the alert count rather than generating distinct alerts.
VOV-15508 Accelerator CS0390432, CS0438406 Adds support for VOV user groups in reservations. The vtk_reservation_create Tcl procedure now accepts a -usergroup option for specifying the name of a VOV user group.
VOV-15770 All None When RDS is active, Monitor now uses a new port, the "event port". The lmmgr start command has a new option -eventport. The option -upport is no longer available.
VOV-15889 Accelerator None Improved error diagnostic messages for syntax errors in RDS configuration file resources.cfg by including the line number where the error is detected.
VOV-15909 FlowTracer None Implemented callback to customize functionality for vovconsole status 'Force Validate...', 'Skip...' and 'Waive Exit Code...'.
VOV-15919 Hero None The FREE_RESOURCES preemption rule type for Hero has been added to the online help.
VOV-15946 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus None The live_keepfor_jobs.tcl file is deleted and the implementation to cleanup the keepfor jobs is moved to vovserver, which can be controlled by following policy parameters: keptJobsCleanupChunkSize and keptJobsCleanupInterval
VOV-15982 Accelerator, Monitor None RDS no longer uses the init port, lmmgr -initport and INIT_PORT parameter in resources.cfg are deprecated.
VOV-16007 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0439498 A new callback has been added that can be used in vnc_policy.tcl. The procedure VncPolicyValidateOptions has been added which takes a sub-command name and a list of options to verify. This procedure is expected to return a modified list of options.
VOV-16022 All None Added a field 'ROLLOVERTS' in the trace object which can be used in the query to address the jobid uniqueness issue.
VOV-16031 FlowTracer None Implemented callback to customize functionality for vovconsole status 'Invalidate...'.
VOV-16036 Accelerator Plus None The online help has been updated to include Azure output parameters for Streaming Data Services.
VOV-16046 Accelerator None With a Tasker set to autokillmethod=direct, autokill will honor signal specifications in NC_STOP_SIGNALS and NC_STP_SIG_DELAY as well as VOV_STOP_SIGNALS.
Multiple signals are comma separated. Each "signal" can be a signal name such as "USR1", or an EXT-like signal specification using EXT:SIGNAL:includerx:excluderx:skiptop format. The EXT-like signal specification can also omit the leading "EXT" so long as it begins with a colon. For example, 
nc run -D -autokill 10s -P NC_STOP_SIGNALS=EXT:USR1:::1,CONT,:USR1:::1,CONT,KILL -P NC_STOP_SIG_DELAY=1 -v 1 -- mylongjob
The default signal list for autokillmethod=direct is TERM,HUP,INT,KILL, but the default can also be controlled by defaultStopSignalCascade in Policy.tcl. defaultStopSignalCascade does NOT support the EXT signal format. It only supports a comma separated list of signal names and it has been this way for quite some time.
VOV-16134 All None The batch_install.csh installation script for Linux is no longer provided with Accelerator product installation media. The new CLI-based installation method on Linux is to use the install.sh script with its -batch option. The new install.sh -batch method is compatible with batch_install.csh with the following 2 exceptions:
  1. If you prefer no confirmation prompt when invoking install.sh to do the CLI installation, specify the -noconfirm option.
  2. The behavior with -local link is different with install.sh vs. batch_install.csh. Use the -local linkext with install.sh to get the equivalent of -local link with batch_install.csh. Read the usage syntax information via install.sh -h for full details.
VOV-16140 Accelerator CS0448878 A SystemD script altair-vovtasker.service was added to common/etc/boot that starts a Tasker named mytaskername in the vnc project as user vovadmin at startup.
VOV-16141 All None Implemented an event to Kafka on project stop.
VOV-16143 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0448778 Procedure for enabling client side logging using RabbitMQ has been added to the online help.
VOV-16147 Monitor None Display a success indicator when assigning a feature alias or cost in the web UI.
VOV-16150 Accelerator, Monitor None The online help has been updated to include the removal of the requirement of the init and update ports for RDS. The event service port is now being used.
VOV-16176 All None Updated the Altair License Server that is included with Accelerator Products packages to version 15.2.0. In addition, the Accelerator software has been built with version 15.2.0, and requires License Servers to be version 15.2.0 or higher. If you are using Altair floating licenses with Accelerator products, then this new version of Accelerator will require that the Altair license server be stopped, upgraded to the version 15.2.0 software included with Accelerator, and restarted.

Resolved Issues

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-12474 Accelerator None Fixed issue causing incorrect start time and duration of resource reservation.
VOV-13992 Accelerator None An issue was found when using the webserver with SSL enabled and when using host-specific certs, where self signed cert files were also generated even though they were not needed. vovserver would still use the correct cert files but creating the self-signed files added some confusion. This has been fixed.
VOV-14462 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0413928 PostgreSQL and SMTP notification passwords are returned in obfuscated form by vtk_prop_get if user is not a project owner.
VOV-15733 Accelerator None Fixed some cases where the incorrect HTTP status code was returned for codes other than success (200). Specifically, with "webprovider=internal", some incorrect HTTP requests would return code 500 rather than 400, or other appropriate codes.
VOV-15740 Accelerator None In recent releases Accelerator jobs launched with an explicit "-r percent/0" resource specification for "percent" were flagged as errors. Starting in this release, 0 of the "percent" resource will be the default. The "-r percent/0" specification on job launch will continue to be flagged as an command syntax error. Users should simply remove "-r percent/0" from the job launch if 0 percent resources are desired.
VOV-15757 FlowTracer CS0404497 Added the buckettime and maxswap job fields to the list of fields that are persistent across restarts.
VOV-15806 Accelerator Plus CS0410831 The fields REQSWAP, REQSLOTS and REQRAM now report a sum of all requested resources rather than the amount of the first request, e.g. "SWAP/10 SWAP/20" will report a REQSWAP field of 30, where it previously would have reported 10.
VOV-15822 Accelerator CS0414459 Calls to vovprop set and vovprop del will now check object ACL's for proper authorization before modifying object properties.
VOV-15828 FlowTracer CS0416354 Fixed issues related to the automatic zipping and unzipping of FILE, FILEX, and PHANTOM databases.
  1. Automatic zipping and unzipping feature is implemented for FILEX and PHANTOM databases. Currently FILEX and PHANTOM end up with new FILE versions of the output file, with the old one disconnected. This issue cannot be fixed because it is not feasible to add the database option to the capsule which can avoid creating same file with different database.
  2. FDL proc I and O are updated with the -zippable argument.
  3. Fixed issue with automatic zipping. It will be triggered in a routine task every 1 minute.
  4. Fixed issue with new "zip" jobs getting created over and over.
VOV-15836 Monitor None Fixed an issue where the expiration of served licenses was not being displayed by Monitor in the Current > Features > All window of the web UI.
VOV-15851 All CS0187053 For this release vovdaemonmgr has been modified to configure some environment variables internally to speed up interactions with vovps utility in situations where a UID may exist on the system without a user entry in the database being associated with the same UID on Linux based platforms.
VOV-15856 Monitor CS0419423 In Monitor, when you click any config file to edit at Admin/System/Configuration Information, it opens a text box that now is again resizable in both dimensions (vertically and horizontally).
VOV-15877 Accelerator None Fix a Monitor life-support issue when RDS is active. The issue symptom was the zeroing out of out-of-queue (OOQ) usage numbers for license resources when Monitor went offline or went down. The problem only occurred for Altair License Manager (aka LMX) license servers being monitored by Monitor.
VOV-15885 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0418925 A DEQUEUE capability, similar to the STOP capability, has been added to the ACL system. The DEQUEUE capability is needed for permission to use nc stop to change a queued job into idle state.
VOV-15886 Accelerator Plus CS0453249 It was possible for two vovwxd daemons to be started for an Accelerator Plus queue, with unpredictable results. This is now fixed, and enforcement is now in place to prevent a second vovwxd daemon from being started.
VOV-15893 Monitor None Fixed issue in Monitor in which the "View Widget Alone" button and the "Help" button where overlapping with the text placed above the graphs.
VOV-15913 Monitor CS0428850 Updated FTLM parser to parse the server version in all formats.
VOV-15926 All None Fixed error message that was displayed in license violation messages.
VOV-15947 Accelerator None Fixed a bug that was causing a Tasker remain in BUSY state when it's reconnected after a network failure.
VOV-15962 Monitor None Fix a memory leak in Altair licensing libraries that had caused the vovserver process associated with Monitor projects to grow by as much as 750 MB per month when licensed with Altair License floating licenses. This fix was accomplished by updating the Altair License management software SDK used to build Accelerator products software to version 15.2.0.
VOV-15968 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0435337 Added support for controlling the minhw server parameter in policy.tcl.
VOV-15978 Allocator CS0440853 In Allocator Overview page: Added ordinal number to each row in the first column. When the text is longer that the space available, each table cell can be scrolled to see the whole content. By default, the Resource column is ordered as per the order in config file.

In Allocator Resources Summary page: Added ordinal number to each row in the first column. The Unassigned row has been fixed to be always the last one. Added ascending and descending sorting. By default, the Nickname column is ordered as per the order in config file.
VOV-15999 FlowTracer CS0432304 Fixed issue in .gz file reading which is resulting in an empty file in the node editor.
VOV-16001 Accelerator Plus CS0439073 Added VOVDIR parameter in vovnc.tcl, which allows you to specify the installation location for wxagent. This can be used in multi-platform setup.
VOV-16005 Allocator None Resolved a Tcl stack trace in lamgr reset due to earlier restructuring of the Monitor data stream.
VOV-16010 Accelerator None The command vovtaskermgr reserveshow and related commands, for example vovshow -reservations now support user group reservations and will display the code S=<groupname> in the "For" column of their output.
VOV-16013 Monitor None Fixed issue when changing the path location of the database in Monitor, in which the new changed path was not being saved.
VOV-16015 All None Added a post-installation script to automate the creation of a "portable" architecture directory for linux64, named linux64p. This portable architecture contains required system libraries and modified binaries that point to them instead of relying on those on the host. The intent of this is to provide an architecture that will run on Red Hat 6 or equivalent. The script, $VOVDIR/../scripts/install-portable-arch.sh, requires the patchelf utility to be installed on the host running it. The reference configuration is based upon RHEL 7.9 or equivalent, and thus, the script will generate and utilize a configuration file (portable-arch.cfg) in the CWD that contains paths to required system libraries specific to that distribution. The configuration file can be adjusted to reflect differences in library locations and/or versions, but note that significant differences in versions may result in the portable architecture being unusable. The configuration file contains a full library path and an optional symlink name on each line. The optional symlink name is unused for the first entry and follows Linux library naming conventions for the remaining entries. To utilize the new linux64p architecture, you must set the VOV_PORTABLE_ARCH environment variable to 1 prior to sourcing the vovrc script that sets up your shell to work with a VOV installation. To summarize the process:
  1. Login to a RHEL 7.9 host or equivalent that has the patchelf utility installed and run the post-installation script: $VOVDIR/../scripts/install-portable-arch.sh.
  2. Login to a RHEL 6.10 host or equivalent, set the VOV_PORTABLE_ARCH environment variable to 1, then source the vovrc script for your shell.
  3. If using with WX, be sure to add the follwoing line to vovwxd's config.tcl: set CONFIG(exeleaf) "wxagent"
VOV-16016 Accelerator None A job now needs ATTACH permission on its fsgroup ACL in order to run. If the run command -G parameter command results in an fsgroup being created, the current user will be the owner of the fsgroup.
VOV-16025 FlowTracer None Fixed vovproject destroy error "can't read "vncConfigRegistry": no such variable".
VOV-16033 Accelerator None When an existing NC queue is upgraded from a 2020.x or prior version to a newer version, the doTestHealthCheckDownSlaves and doTestHealthCheckSlaveset vovnotifyd health checks will not be automatically replaced with the corresponding health checks in the "Tasker" lexicon. To enable these health checks with new names doTestHealthCheckDownTaskers and doTestHealthCheckTaskerst", navigate to the web UI under Admin > Daemons > vovnotifyd and disable each health check. Then wait a few seconds and reenable the health check.
VOV-16055 All None Fixed handling of the "create" provisioning method for the "local" directory when installing in batch mode.
VOV-16059 All None Fixes a potential crash when running a vovselect, vtk_select_loop or related query that selects from a named set that is subsequently deleted before the query finishes processing, that is, "vovselect id,status from temporarySet".
VOV-16144 Accelerator Plus CS0435310 Accelerator Plus now ensures that the Accelerator Plus' version of the vov utilities are used in the job pipeline when dispatching to a different version Accelerator queue. This prevents errors such as features being used that are not present in an older version base queue.
VOV-16146 Monitor None Fix an issue in the Monitor web UI History > Checkout Statistics page, whereby the Cost column was being incorrectly calculated in some cases. The correct value of Cost is the "Total" column value multiplied by the hourly cost per token.
VOV-16154 All None Fixed an issue where the login link on the NC guest page did not honor the SSL setting and always used HTTP.
VOV-16160 Accelerator Plus CS0453463 Taskers will no longer consider themselves "idle" for the purposes of max idle calculations when they only have suspended jobs.
VOV-16172 Accelerator None Fixed an issue that caused vovresourced to exit when configured to interface with a non-existent instance of Monitor.
VOV-16195 Monitor None The URL shown in batch reports has been fixed to point to the correct host and port per the web server configuration.
VOV-16211 FlowTracer None Keeping FT web UI login page as it is, linking the old UI with the new one with a button in the header (similar to NC dashboard is linked).
VOV-16220 Accelerator None Renamed -mistral to -ioprofile. To run a job with Mistral or use the GUI to see Mistral results, we need to add -ioprofile tag. Example: 
nc run -ioprofile <job> , nc gui -ioprofile <jobId>
VOV-16254 Monitor None Fixed an issue that prevented Tasker load graphs from being rendered on the Machine Load page that is located under the Network tab.
VOV-16261 FlowTracer None Fixed an issue that prevented arrows from being rendered in vovconsole node graphs.
VOV-16281 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0468254 Fixed a bug that's causing fatal errors in vovserver when servicing older version of vovwxd clients configured for DirectDrive. This happens when FlowTracer projects or Accelerator Plus queues are configured with Direct Drive and an Accelerator base queue.