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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.
CHOICEMASK Resource

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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

CHOICEMASK Resource

The resource CHOICEMASK can be found, typically, in resource expressions assigned to "resumer jobs", which are auxiliary jobs used to resume other jobs that have been preempted. This is not really a resource, but rather a method to control the evaluation of the expressions that contain OR branches.

Normally, all branches of the expression are evaluated. If CHOICEMASK is present in the expression, it controls which branches are chosen. For example, if you have an expression with one OR branch, the presence of CHOICEMASK#0 forces the selection of the left branch, while CHOICEMASK#1 forces the selection of the right branch.

If more OR branches are present in the expanded expression, the bits in CHOICEMASK are used in order to select either the left (bit value 0) or the right (bit value 1) branch in the expression.

It is unlikely that a user will want to use CHOICEMASK to a job, but it is considered to be legal.

Examples of CHOICEMASK

The expression

"License:aa OR License:bb"

evaluates first the availability of License:aa, then the availability of License:bb.

The expression

"CHOICEMASK#0 ( License:aa OR License:bb )"

forces the choice of License:aa.

The expression

"CHOICEMASK#1 ( License:aa OR License:bb )"

forces the choice of License:bb.