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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.
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.
Rank the Resource Agents
Resource ranking allows a resource to be managed by multiple agents, such is the case with vovmultiqueued and vovresourced. The simple idea is that a ranking is assigned to the agents, and the agent with the highest rank wins. With ranking, you can setup a redundant system of daemons.

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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
- 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.
  - Resource Monitoring
  - Resource Map Set
    The Resource Map Set represents the collection of resource maps that have been assigned to a project and the constraints associated with such resources.
  - Resource Mapping
    As the vovservers determines which tasker is most suited to execute a particular job, it performs a mapping of the job resources, followed by a matching of the mapped resources.
  - Resource Reservation
    Resource reservation ensure that specific groups always has access to licenses, regardless of the number of jobs.
  - Delete Resources
    To delete a resource map, use the Tcl procedure vtk_resourcemap_delete in vovsh. Resource maps may be deleted by ID or by name.
  - Rank the Resource Agents
    Resource ranking allows a resource to be managed by multiple agents, such is the case with vovmultiqueued and vovresourced. The simple idea is that a ranking is assigned to the agents, and the agent with the highest rank wins. With ranking, you can setup a redundant system of daemons.
  - Resource Daemon Configuration
  - vovresourcemgr
    vovresourcemgr is a utility for managing VOV resource maps. It may be used to create, modify, forget, and reserve resource maps.
  - Policies and Resources
    You can define site-specific policies on how resources are allocated to various projects by creating a file called $VOVDIR/local/resources.tcl. This file contains the definition of a procedure called vtk_resources_policy_hook and can be used to limit the amount of resources assigned to a given project.
  - Add Resources
  - CHOICEMASK Resource
  - License-based Resources
    This section describes the Accelerator interface to Monitor, an application that monitors license servers and makes the in-use information available to Accelerator.
  - Configuring Job and License Checkout Matching
    When a resource is derived from a license feature, it is useful to attempt a matching of the license handles that are currently checked out and the jobs that are currently running.
- 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.

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Rank the Resource Agents

Resource ranking allows a resource to be managed by multiple agents, such is the case with vovmultiqueued and vovresourced. The simple idea is that a ranking is assigned to the agents, and the agent with the highest rank wins. With ranking, you can setup a redundant system of daemons.

By default, vovmultiqueued has rank 20 while vovresourced has rank 3. If a resource is managed by both, then vovmultiqueued wins. However, if the vovmultiqueued daemon stops (for maintenance or because the network link has been broken) then vovresourced will take over after the expiration time of the resource.

Typically, agents with higher ranking will use shorter expiration times.

Control the Rank of vovresourced

The default rank for vovresourced is 3. From the command line, use the option -rank as in:

% vovresourced -rank 4

or set the variable RESD(rank) in the config.tcl file.

Control the Rank of vovmultiqueued

The default rank for vovmultiqueued is 20. From the command line, use the option -rank as in:

% vovmultiqueued -rank 28

or call the procedure VovMQSetRank in the config.tcl file.

# Fragment of vovmultiqueued/config.tcl 
VovMQSetRank 28

Ranks Less Than 20 and Out-of-queue Jobs

If an agent has a rank less than 20, then the server will automatically adjust the number of available resources to account for out-of-queue jobs. This also means that for rank 20 or above, the server does not automatically account for out-of-queue jobs.

This is done because in the case of vovmultiqueued, the server does not have enough information to compute the out-of-queue jobs, and such computation is therefore left to vovmultiqueued.

Rank 1000 and More

This rank is used for resources in the dedicated server for Allocator.

Summary of Ranks for Resource Maps

0	Used for automatically generated resources
1-19	Used for vovresourced. Default is 3
20-999	Used for resources managed by Allocator. Default is 30 and typical values are between 20 and 40.
1000	Used for resources in the dedicated server for Allocator.
other values	Not used