Home
VOV Subsystem Administrator Guide
This manual provides information about managing a VOV project, including starting the server and connecting computing resources such as computers and licenses.
Advanced Tasker Topics
vovtsd on UNIX

Welcome
What's New
View new features for VOV Subsystem 2025.1.2.
Overview
Discover the workspace, licensing and installation, and training.
VOV Subsystem Tutorials
Discover VOV Subsystem functionality with interactive tutorials.
VOV Subsystem Administrator Guide
This manual provides information about managing a VOV project, including starting the server and connecting computing resources such as computers and licenses.
- Client/Server Architecture
  All of Altair Accelerator's products are based on a client/server architecture to support concurrent activities, team coordination, distributed data management, and distributed processing. The program vovserver runs in the background as a service to implement the main product features. It is the server.
- VOV Projects
  A "project" is a named collection of jobs, together with all the files that are used and produced by those jobs. The contents of VOV projects can be custom organized.
- VOV Registry
  The VOV Registry contains the list of all projects known to an installation of Altair Accelerator software. The registry is used by the vovproject command, and stores metadata such as the host machine and port number of a project.
- Get Started
- Start and Configure the Server
- Connect to a Project
- Stop the Server
- Recovery and Redundancy
- Files, Equivalences, Exclusions
  The files used in a project reside in one or more directories spread all around your filesystems. Each logical name defined in the equiv.tcl file implicitly declares the root of a workspace. You can browse the workspaces using the browser interface.
- Taskers
  A tasker is a VOV client that provides computing resources, specifically CPU cycles, to the vovserver.
- Tasker Policies
- 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.
- Advanced Tasker Topics
  - Hardware Resources
    All taskers offer a predefined set of hardware resources that can be requested by jobs.
  - HOST_OF_jobId and HOST_OF_ANTECEDENT
    Sometime, a job needs to run on the same host as another job. This condition can be expressed with the special resource "HOST=HOST_OF_<jobid>" and " HOST=HOST_OF_ANTECEDENT".
  - 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
  - vovtsd (Tasker Service Daemon)
    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
  - Map Host Names
    In several points in the systems, it is useful to get the host name for a checkout, for a job, for a daemon, etc. Since every machine may be known by different names, it is important to provide the expert user with the ability to map host names to some canonical form of the host name.
- Resource Management
  Altair Accelerator includes a subsystem for managing computing resources. This allows the design team to factor in various constraints regarding hardware and software resources, as well as site policy constraints.
- IT Administrator Topics
VOV Subsystem Reference Guide
EDA Tool Integration Guide
This document is a collection of techniques that have proven to be useful when applying FlowTracer in Electronic Design Automation.

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.