Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.5

February 14, 2020

We are happy to announce the ARC 6.5.0 release. This release comes with quite a large set of enhancements and improvements.

Bug 3841 (jobs piling up in FINISHING state) which one known site suffers with, is proving resilient. We believe that a busy file system hosting the job's session directory had strong negative impact on the data staging. This needs more investigation and future development to optimize the load on session directories.

However bug 3890 related to xrootd transfers, which had to be reverted in release 6.4.1, is now solved.

Highlights in this release

Of enhancements and new features we would like to highlight:

Arcctl:

• arcctl can now be installed standalone without A-REX. It comes with the test CA and 3rd party deploy (CA certs, VOMS) on board.
• As before you get the full arcctl if you install A-REX

Client area enhancements:

• installation automated with standalone arcctl
• new consistent and streamlined submission endpoint selection options
• consistent target-area oriented globus plugins split
• bash completion for client tools
• documentation for clients!

ARCHERY management:

• new JSON configuration for flexible services topology definition

Technology preview:
This release also includes the technology preview of a new functionality: The "Community-defined RTEs" ecosystem that enables automated software environment provisioning on ARC CEs by community software managers. The ecosystem consists of two layers: An ARCHERY-based software (RTE) registry and a new set of ARC control tool modules. More details can be found in documentation.

The following Bugzilla tickets are resolved

• 3907 Implement the community-defined RTEs provisioning proposal
• 3905 More flexible service endpoints and grouping definition for archery-manage
• 3904 New consistent submission endpoints selection for ARC6 client
• 3903 Decouple arcctl from the A-REX package to be used independently
• 3895 Implement minwalltime and mincputime manual configuration in arc.conf
• 3891 A-REX crashes stemming from Logger
• 3890 xrootd transfers don't work
• 3887 MaxWallTime and MaxCPUTime not propagated to infosys
• 3885 A-rex crashed (Duplicate of 3890)
• 3880 logs created as root user when user= defined in [arex] block causes the service not to start
• 3838 Ensure space trimming in block names all over the code
• 3538 ARC Client libraries should take the batch system queue name from GLUE2 ComputingShare.MappingQueue and NOT from ComputingShare.Name

Documentation

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

If you miss something or 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

Note that if you instead install from EPEL for RHEL7 compatible systems, the ARC 6 packages can be found as nordugrid-arc6-* and not nordugrid-arc-*. This was needed in order to supply both ARC 5 already available for RHEL7 and the new ARC 6.

We provide binary builds for all supported versions of:

• Debian (i386 and amd64)
• Fedora (i386 and x86_64)
• CentOS EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7/EL8 (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: (i386 and amd64, both LTS and interim releases)

In addition we build nightly packages for older platforms.

Future Support of ARC 5-series

Note that 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