Release Announcement for ARC version 0.8.3

October 29, 2010

The 0.8.3 is a minor bugfix release for the 0.8.2 release.

The Advanced Resource Connector as of version 0.8.3 is an open source software solution that enables production quality computational grids for high throughput computing, encompassing a wide range of size and purpose. The middleware integrates computing resources (typically, computing clusters managed by a batch system) and, to a lesser extent, storage services, making them available via an information system and a common secure grid layer. The middleware builds upon standard open source solutions such as OpenSSL, OpenLDAP and libxml2, as well as some Globus Toolkit 5 pre-WS libraries. It relies on well-tested technologies in creating unique ARC-specific services and tools. ARC developers strive to achieve simplicity, non-invasiveness, high performance, stability and reliability. With release 0.8.3 ARC middleware is officially supported on major Linux flavours, and is known to operate smoothly on other Linux systems, with a variety of batch job management systems. Starting from release 0.8.2 several of the new components are also available on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

Bug fixes:

• Fix for CVE-2010-3372, bad handling of LD_LIBRARY_PATH
• protection against missing queue in xRSL for SGE
• Fix detection of broken checksum calculation
• Fix for 'nan' appearing when number is expected with SGE (bug #1986)
• if RUNTIME_NODE_SEES_FRONTEND is not set, then RUNTIME_NODE_JOB_DIR does not get set
• Fix for reporting of exit code in SGE (bug #1999)
• Properly handle SLURM timestamps with 'T'
• Properly initialize jobfile variable in SLURM
• Improved documentation
• Walltime can be published as floats in LL and LSF (bug #2002 and bug #2021)
• srmPutDone can fail after checksum check (bug #2022)
• Cache filenames are not unique with LFC:GUID (bug #2024)
• Replicas are ordered by access latency (bug #1957)
• Can specify a pattern on which to order replicas (bug #1933)
• Fix problem submitting jobs that contain spaces in job name on SGE
• PBS no longer reports nodes that are offline/down in totalcpus (bug #2043)
• PBS now reports running jobs better (bug #2043)
• make it possible to perform duplicate detection of jobs in SGAS with jobs submitted from the LRMSURGen tool
• make it possible to specify logfile and loglevel for the arc-ur-logger
• support paths as service endpoints (instead of just complete urls)
• change-lsf-mode is now an executable (bug #2003)
• ngls works when $HOME is not set (bug #2050)
• Increasing default BDII_SEARCH_TIMEOUT in BDII4 to 300 as it is in BDII_READ_TIMEOUT in BDII5 (bug #2055)
• Updated ngconfigtest to handle new arc installations better
• Support FULLNODE runtime environment in LoadLeveler
• Backporting solution for sharig control files with infosys user which takes into account additional groups of users
• Making allownew=no in gridftpd's configuration affect only new job submission requests
• Infosys now creates correct glue output, new options in arc.conf was added
• Fix for execution nodes sometimes not getting published properly
• Fix for usedcpus reported from different versions of torque, also added performance improvements
• Fix for LSF not reporting LRMS start/end-time properly (bug #2088)

Known issues as of 0.8.3 release

• Some users have ran into problems with Python path not set correctly on 64bit systems (bug #1946).
  Proposed workaround: PYTHONPATH variable needs to include both /opt/nordugrid/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ and /opt/nordugrid/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/ depending on your Python version.
• The new GUI, arcjobtool does not work on Ubuntu.
• The new GUI, arcjobtool requires you to install nordugrid-arc-nox-plugins-globus if you want to submit to ARC-CE resources.
• Deployment of the replicated A-hash for Chelonia Deployment of the replicated A-hash for Chelonia requires at least version 4.6 of db4 while db4-4.3 is provided by the RHEL5 distribution. The replicated A-hash has been validated on 64-bit RHEL5 with db4-4.7 and bsddb3-4.8.2, neither of which are provided as part of the RHEL5 distribution.
  db4-4.7 may be downloaded from Oracle and built from the source tarball (see "Previous releases" on Oracle downloads). It can be installed in either /usr (doesn't conflict with 4.3) or /usr/local (it is automatically discovered by bsddb3 in either location).
  db4-4.8 was found not to work and according to the release notes bsddb3 doesn't support db4-5.0 yet.
  bsddb3 provides the required python bindings to db4. It can be downloaded from here. Build and install instructions are included, see README.txt after unpacking the tarball. If e.g. db4-4.7 is installed in /usr or /usr/local you should be able to build and install bsddb3 with "python setup.py build; python setup.py install".

To get ARC 0.8.3:

The source and binary packages are available from: http://download.nordugrid.org

The standalone client tarballs are available from: http://download.nordugrid.org

Instructions for setting up your machine to use the NorduGrid repository are available in NorduGrid Wiki

More information:

Please consult release notes of ARC 0.8 for detailed product description.

The dedicated release Wiki page contains detailed information about the release content, build and installation.

Consult documentation section of the NorduGrid website