Home
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.
Advanced Information
vovtsd on UNIX

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
  - Tasker: vtk_tasker_set_timeleft
    This procedure is used in the context of time-variant tasker resources. It takes a single non-negative argument, which is interpreted as the maximum expected duration for a job to be dispatched to the tasker.
  - Troubleshoot Taskers
  - Manage Remote Taskers Without SSH/RSH Capabilities
    The program vovtsd is a daemon written as a Tcl script that runs using the VOV vtclsh binary. This daemon can be used also to start various types of agents on any type of Windows or UNIX machine.
  - vovtsd on UNIX
- 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

vovtsd on UNIX

UNIX: Start a Remote Tasker with vovtsd

The program vovtsd can also be used on UNIX. In most cases, you may want to use built-in operating system commands like rsh or ssh.

You must change the taskers.tcl file to set the -vovtsdport variable to the port number used by your vovtsd daemon. For example, if vovtsd is running on port 16001, then your taskers.tcl file needs to specify the port number and a number of directories and files as seen by the remote host:

vtk_tasker_set_default -vovtsdport 16001           -vovdir     $env(VOVDIR)    -serverdir  
/home/john/vov  -logfile    /home/john/vov/$env(VOV_PROJECT_DIR).swd/logs/taskers/@TASKERNAME@/log  -executable vovtaskerroot

The vovtaskermgr command tries to start a remote tasker first with vovtsd and then with either rsh or ssh. Which remote shell command is tried depends on which you have configured with the -rshcmd option of vtk_tasker_define in the taskers.tcl file.