Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.2.0

August 30, 2019

We are happy to announce the ARC 6.2.0 release, which includes some bugfixes and enhancements to 6.1.0.

Highlights in this release:

• The way SLURM handles environment variables caused failure in ENV/PROXY updates. A workaround was provided for ARC 6.1 through arc.conf by setting slurm_requirements=--export=None in the [lrms] block. Now this workaround is no longer needed as the backend script is fixed.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been resolved

• 3853 cancel-SLURM-job does not work correctly
• 3851 Gridftp submission stops working when per-queue allowaccess is enabled
• 3850 SLURM backend copies ARC CE environment causing updated ENV/PROXY failure
• 3849 Mystery bug: custom BDII PIDFile location causes infosys directory chown to root at each infoproviders run
• 3848 Dummy RTE can stop other RTE from being processed by submission scripts
• 3845 Provide a hook for an external agent to change DTR priorities
• 3844 arex and gridftpd services fail to start due to python version
• 3544 Patch for BDII Job Count Breakdown

Other improvements

In addition the following enhancements and changes are included, together with some other minor improvements

• Component: Arcctl
  • Adding new features to arcctl job management script for rendering stdout/stderr
• Component: Accounting
  • Job resource usage accounting using cgroups - adding a new way of doing job resource usage accounting in ARC.
• Component: Building
  • Python 3.8 needed for Fedora 32
  • The ENV/SINGULARITY RTE is now added to the ARC distribution

Documentation

The ARC 6 documentation has been rewritten in a modern format and is placed at this location.

Please note that although the most important parts of the ARC 6 documentation are in place, it is still not fully complete. If you have questions, please contact us!

Installing ARC 6

We recommend to install ARC release using the Nordugrid repository.

• Start with the basics
• Get production ready

We provide binary builds for the following systems:

• Debian: 7 - 9 (i386 and amd64)
• Fedora: 12 - 30 (i386 and x86_64)
• CentOS: EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7 (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: 14.04 - 19.04 (i386 and amd64, both LTS and interim releases)

Future Support of ARC 5-series

Now that ARC 6 is released, we will only provide security updates of ARC 5.

In particular:

1. No new feature development is planned or going on for ARC5 and no bug-fixing development will happen on ARC5 code base in the future except for security issues.
2. Security fixes for ARC5 will be provided till end of June 2020.
3. Production Sites already running ARC 5 will be able to get deployment and configuration troubleshooting help via GGUS till end June 2021. This we call "operational site support".
4. ARC5 is available in EPEL7 and will stay there. EPEL8 will only contain ARC 6.

Getting in Touch

If you need help with the configuration file or have any other questions related to ARC 6, please contact us via

• Email: (Subscribe)
• Skype channel dedicated to ARC 6 support

Previous releases

Details of previous releases can be found at the ARC Releases page