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Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
Configuration for Elastic Computing
vovwxd
vovwxd is a daemon used for dynamically requesting taskers from another job scheduler, that is, a base queue. This process is referred to as elastic computing. This daemon is the key component of the Accelerator Plus product and is also used with FlowTracer when interfacing with an external job scheduler.
Using Direct Drive with vovwxd
Direct Drive provides a method to reduce latency of job start times and improved scaling as more base queues are added.

Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.0.
FlowTracer Overview
An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
FlowTracer Tutorials
Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
- FlowTracer Roles
  When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
- Enable CLI Access on UNIX
  This section explains how to set up a UNIX user's shell environment to have a proper context for the user to run installed Altair Accelerator programs from the command line. The programs that are run from the command line are called the CLI commands.
- Enable CLI Access on Windows
  This section explains how to set up a Window user's command prompt environment to have the proper context for the user to run installed Altair Accelerator programs from the command line. The programs that are run from the command line are called the CLI commands.
- User Interfaces
- Use FlowTracer Help
  FlowTracer documentation is available in HTML and PDF format.
- Projects
- Server Working Directory
  When a project is created, a server working directory (.swd directory) is created to hold configuration and state information about the project.
- Alerts
  VOV issues an "alert" when an event requires attention. An alert can range from information that does not require action to an urgent fault that requires immediate action.
- Manage the Server for a Project
- Security
  The VOV security model consists of assigning a Security Code to each client or client group (VovUser Group) and granting the permission to execute critical tasks only to clients with the appropriate security level.
- Taskers
  A tasker is a VOV client that provides computing resources, specifically CPU cycles, to the vovserver.
- Interfaces to Accelerator, SGE, LSF, and Others
  FlowTracer can be used also as a front end to an existing batch processing system (BPS), for example, Accelerator, LSF, SGE, SGEEE, etc.
- Configuration for Elastic Computing
  - vovwxd
    vovwxd is a daemon used for dynamically requesting taskers from another job scheduler, that is, a base queue. This process is referred to as elastic computing. This daemon is the key component of the Accelerator Plus product and is also used with FlowTracer when interfacing with an external job scheduler.
    - vovwxd Process Loop
    - vovwxd Daemon Configuration Parameters
    - Using Direct Drive with vovwxd
      Direct Drive provides a method to reduce latency of job start times and improved scaling as more base queues are added.
  - (Deprecated) Configure FlowTracer to Interface With LSF
    You can configure FlowTracer to allocate jobs on CPUs managed by LSF while avoiding the taxing per-job scheduling overhead imposed by LSF. You do this by adding the daemon program vovlsfd to the set of service programs that run in the background.
- Configuration for Altair Accelerator
- Configure a Failover Server Replacement
  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.
- Advanced Information
- Multi-User Altair FlowTracer
  FlowTracer now supports a "multi-user" mode of operation, as a Beta feature. In the multi-user mode, many different users can share the same project, in terms of modifying a flow as well as running different compoments of the flow.
- IT Administrator Topics
- Special Issues
- Miscellaneous
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Using Direct Drive with vovwxd

Direct Drive provides a method to reduce latency of job start times and improved scaling as more base queues are added.

Accelerator Plus and FlowTracer utilize a Direct Drive mechanism in vovwxd to bypass the driver script and speed up tasker requests into the base queue. The WXLauncher tasker is no longer required and the use of launcher jobs is avoided. The call backs defined in the vovnc.tcl script are no longer active, although a future version may reinstate some of them.

Note: Direct Drive only works using an NC base queue 2021.1.1 or higher.

Set up a WX queue with one or more base NC queues.
Copy the vovaccel.tcl file to the SWD/vovwxd directory.

In the vovwxd config.tcl file, set the following parameters:

set CONFIG(plugin)			"libvovaccel.so"
set CONFIG(driver_script)     "vovaccel.tcl"

When a request is issued, vovwxd will create a copy of the local bucket in the base queue. This bucket will appear as "foreign bucket" in the base queue. Bucket objects now have new fields to accommodate the foreign buckets: isforeign, wxbucketid, and wxqueue. These can be queried with vovselect.

Note: DirectDrive uses a different format of a driver script. The CONFIG(driver_script) parameter must specify an appropriate script. An example is available in $VOVDIR/etc/config/vovwxd/vovaccel.tcl.

set CONFIG(driver_script) "vovaccel.tcl"

Currently only two procedures are supported: OnProcessBucket BUCKETINFO (for filtering buckets) and OnConfigLoaded(CONFIG), which is called when the config file is modified.