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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.
IT Administrator Topics
Ignore Links into the DesignSync Cache
If you use DesignSync, you want to ignore links to the DesignSync cache.

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
- 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
  - SSH Setup
    If you use SSH to login onto certain machines in your LAN that you want to use as taskers, you need to setup SSH so that it will not ask for your password.
  - Network Conditioning
    Each computer has its own clock. Clocks on different computers in the same network might not be synchronized. The system administrator should keep all clocks in the network synchronized.
  - File System Offsets
    The file system that contains the design files may reside on a machine that is not the same as the one where the vovserver is running. The clocks in the two machines may be different, resulting in an offset. These offsets can be easily avoided. Here we show what can be done to work with an unsynchronized network.
  - NFS and VOV
    Before you can use NFS, be it as server or client, you must make sure your kernel has NFS support compiled in.
  - Using PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) for Browser Authentication
  - Known Issues
  - Health Monitoring and vovnotifyd
  - Check All Files in a Project
    When you request a run, the FlowTracer server checks the timestamp of all primary inputs in the upcone of the target.
  - vovcleanup
    The utility vovcleanup is used to clean old log files from /tmp and from the server working directory.
  - GUI Customization
    Both the vovconsole's main GUI and its Node Editor GUI can be customized with the gui.tcl file.
  - Annotations
    Annotations are text strings which may be attached to VOV objects. These are typically used to provide additional information about objects in the project's graph. The text must be less than 32k characters.
  - Ignore Links into the DesignSync Cache
    If you use DesignSync, you want to ignore links to the DesignSync cache.
- Special Issues
- Miscellaneous
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Ignore Links into the DesignSync Cache

If you use DesignSync, you want to ignore links to the DesignSync cache.

This can be done by setting the variable VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR to the full path to the DesignSync cache. The symlinks will not be resolved to the final name, but will keep the original symlink name. The nodes are still present in the graph (they are not excluded, as with exclude.tcl).

For example, suppose that you have the cache directory in /opt/local/dssc/sync_cache, you can avoid showing the cache by setting the following environment variable before running the tools:

% setenv VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR `vovequiv -p /opt/local/dssc/sync_cache`

We use vovequiv -p ... to eliminate any symbolic links in the path of the DesignSync cache itself.

The variable VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR is read by the wrappers (vw, vov, ...) at runtime.

If you use multiple caches, use a colon-separated list of paths as the value of the VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR.

% setenv VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR /opt/local/dir1/sync_cache:/remote/.sync/cache_dir

Let's assume you have the following file on disk:

%  ls -lrt top.v
lrwxr-xr-x  1 ged  staff  126 Aug  9 14:37  top.v ->
      /opt/local/dssc/sync_cache/sfb/sfbf04ef93dg158ed-1.2-1310712769-0

FlowTracer will display the file as top.v when the VOV_SYNC_CACHE_DIR environment variable is correctly set.

The real file name sfbf04ef93dg158ed-1.2-1310712769-0 will not be displayed.

To further debug this mechanism, you can use the -d option in vovequiv to see how symbolic links are mapped:

% vovequiv -d -p aaa
vovsh Aug 29 09:49:39 SYMLINK: SYNC_CACHE_DIR is '/remote/projects/sync_cache'
vovsh Aug 29 09:49:39 SYMLINKS: Replaced '/home/casotto/projects/ac8head/testing/main/dssc_test_run/abc.txt' with '/home/casotto/projects/ac8head/testing/main/dssc_test_run/tmp_sync_cache/1234567890-1.2-123456789CACHE_FILE1234'
vovsh Aug 29 09:49:39 SYMLINK: path '/remote/projects/sync_cache/1234567890-1.2-123456789CACHE_FILE1234' is in CACHE_DIR