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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.
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.
Interface with LSF using taskerLSF.tcl

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.
  - Connect to a Third Party Batch Processing System
    FlowTracer provides default implementations of interfaces for some of the Batch Processing Systems. FlowTracer also provides Tcl APIs for easy, flexible and extensible implementation of interfaces to the Batch Processing System of your interest. This enables FlowTracer to fit into any existing Enterprise Grid.
  - Interface FlowTracer with Accelerator
    There are two ways to interface FlowTracer to Accelerator.
  - Interfaces to Other Batch Processing Systems
    You can find examples of interfaces in the directory $VOVDIR/etc/tasker_scripts. The file $VOVDIR/etc/tasker_scripts/taskerLSF.tcl implements the interface to LSF.
  - Subordinate Resources
    The subordinate resources are the resources of a job that appear after the first '--' in the resource specification.
  - Interface with LSF using taskerLSF.tcl
- 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
- Special Issues
- Miscellaneous
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Interface with LSF using taskerLSF.tcl

Start the LSF Tasker

You can start the tasker from the command line:

% vovtasker -a LSF -i 0 -I $VOVDIR/etc/tasker_scripts/taskerLSF.tcl -r "lsf" -T 100

Alternatively, you can define the tasker in the taskers.tcl file:

# Fragment of taskers.tcl file
vtk_tasker_define localhost -name LSF  -indirect  $env(VOVDIR)/etc/tasker_scripts/taskerLSF.tcl  -transient 0      
-resources "lsf"  -capacity  100

The tasker is non transient, to preserve the status of the jobs submitted to LSF even in the event of a crash of the tasker.

Environment Variable VOV_LSF_QUEUES

The variable VOV_LSF_QUEUES is a comma separated list of queue names. If the variable is defined, the first queue in the list is going to be the default queue to which the jobs are submitted. This default can be overridden on a job by job basis by defining the resource "Queue:QNAME".

Job Submission with vovfire

Each job submitted from taskerLSF.tcl uses vovfire. The submission command is going to have the following form:

bsub [BSUB OPTIONS] vovfire 00012345 label_computed_from_command_line

Resource Mapping

The procedure taskerMapResources in file taskerLSF.tcl performs mapping of job resources into LSF submission specifications. This procedure can be redefined in a file called $VOVDIR/local/taskerLSF.tcl. The default mapping is described in the following table.


Job Resource	LSF bsub parameter	Example
Jobname:jname	-J jname	Jobname:abc	-J abc
LSFcpus#N	-n $N	LSFcpus#4	-n 4
LSFtiles#N	-n $N	LSFtiles#2	-n 2
License:lic	rusage [lic=1]	License:qx	rusage [qx=1]
Queue:qname	-q qname	Queue:night	-p night
RAM/*	rusage [mem=*]	RAM/200	rusage [mem=200]
RAMFREE/*	rusage [mem=*]	RAMFREE/200	rusage [mem=200]
swp/*	rusage[swp=*]	swp/100	rusage [swp=100]
tmp/*	rusage[tmp=*]	tmp/200	rusage [tmp=100]

anything else is ignored