GridWay 5.0.1 Incremental Release Notes

This is the first GridWay release since it entered the Globus incubator project. It is mainly a maintenance release with no major features, but includes many bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Release Date: November 17th, 2006

This release includes new functionality in the following GridWay commands:

• gwps: New options have been added to control the command output and to select the jobs to be listed.
• gwacct: Now it can display usage statistics from a given period of time
• gwsubmit: Arbitrary start and increment values can be specified for array jobs. Two new variables PARAM (environment GW_PARAM) and MAX_PARAM (environment GW_MAX_PARAM) will be available in remote process's environment and to define job template attributes (filenames, arguments…).

You can find out more information in the commands help (-h option) or in the command reference guide.

The retrying requests of the Execution and Transfer MADs has been improved. GridWay follows a linear back-off retry strategy in case of MAD failures, which has been implemented at the operation level.

Also development settings has been removed from MADs. Moreover the MADs are now executed with a low priority (using nice values).

When a resource fails, GridWay now implements an exponential linear back-off strategy at resource level (and per each user), henceforth resources with persistent failures are discarded (for a given user).

Also the scheduler module has been re-design and coded from scratch to improve its scalability. Now an asynchronous scheduler to GW communication pattern is followed. Moreover its internal structures has been modified to include easy to use scheduling policies (as the scheduler skeleton has not been very popular among GridWay users). Note. These new policies will be available in version 5.2.

From this release onwards GridWay won't use Storage Elements to transfer files by default. Now transfer and execution are performed as follows:

• The new gw_tm_mad_dummy Transfer MAD is used, which enables reverse transfers between the worker node (WN) and the client (using GASS or GridFTP).
• The rsl_nsh RSL generation function is used, which transfers the wrapper, along with its stdout and stderr streams.
• The wrapper executing in the WN automatically transfers job.env and input/output files from/to the client.

Here is the list of bugs fixed in GridWay 5.0.1, follow the links for a description of each bug: 4713, 4780, 4509, 4511, 4677, 4709, 4832, 4783, 4563, 4712, 4830, 4801, 4537, 4820, 4816, 4722, 4811, 4562, 4633, 4525