1. A View from the Top
Al Geist
February 22-23
Houston TX

2. Participating Organizations
Coordinator: Al Geist
Participating Organizations
ORNL
ANL
LBNL
PNNL
SNL
LANL
Ames
NCSA
PSC
SDSC
IBM
Compaq
SGI
Scyld
Intel
Unlimited Scale
Main Web Site
Recently web server experienced problems

3. Scalable Systems Software Center
Review of Last Meeting
Scalable Systems Software Center
November 28-29
Dallas TX
Details on page 12
Main project notebook

4. Progress Reports at Nov. mtg
Al Geist – working groups, notebooks, telecoms
Fred Johnson –
Program management is a big focus
Projects are under the microscope
Interactions chart – encouraged to show utility
Wants to see software prototypes not just API
Working Group Leaders –
What areas their working group is addressing
Progress report on what their group has done
Present problems being addressed
Next steps for the group
Discussion items for the larger group to consider

5. Consensus and Voting: Wire Protocol Proposal:
Passed strawvote 10 for / 1 against / 1 abstain
ClusterBIOS Proposal:
Passed strawvote 10 for / 0 against / 3 abstain
Three Data Delivery Models:
Discussion, refinement suggestions made to have two modes
vote deferred until revised proposal written up
XML Schema Formalization:
Discussion of issues that must be addressed
no vote requested
SC2001 Cluster BOFS:
suggestion that Scalable Systems have a BOF at SC2002

6. Scalable Systems Software Center
Progress Since Last Meeting
Scalable Systems Software Center
November - February

7. January 15-16 SciDAC PI Meeting
Al Geist gave 15 minute overview presentation on the Scalable Systems Software Project
Paul Hargrove and Al Geist manned a poster session on Morning of January 16
Opportunity to meet new groups who need our stuff
NERSC, CCS, and OSC among others expressed interest
Meeting with Fred the afternoon of January 16
Open source issues still being worked
CCA is the first test case

8. Five Notebooks in place and filling up
A main notebook for general information
And individual notebooks for each working group
Allows groups to keep track of other groups progress and comment on the items of overlap
Allows Center members and interested parties to see what is being defined and implemented
Over 130 total pages – 56 added since last meeting
Get to all notebooks through main web site
Click on side bar or at “project notebooks” at bottom of page

9. Four Weekly Working Group Telecoms
Resource management, scheduling, and accounting
Tuesday 3:00 pm (Eastern) keyword “SSS mtg”
Validation and Testing
Wednesday 1:00 pm (Eastern) mtg code
Proccess management, system monitoring, and checkpointing
Thursday 1:00 pm (Eastern) mtg code
Node build, configuration, and information service
Friday 3:00 pm (Eastern) mtg code 58145

10. Working Group Mailing Lists
Resource management working group
Proccess management working group
Node build, configuration working group
Validation and testing working group
Mailing lists used for
notification of new notebook entries
meeting setup or changes
Not for ideas and proposals

11. Scalable Systems Software Center
This Meeting
Scalable Systems Software Center
November 28-29,2001

12. Agenda – February 22 8:00 Breakfast
8: Al Geist – “View from the Top”
9: Fred Johnson – MICS report
Working Group Reports
9: Narayan Desi – Node Build, Configure
10: Break
11: Scott Jackson – Resource Management
12: Lunch (on own but go somewhere as group)
1: Paul Hargrove – Process Management
2: Erik Debenedictis – Validation and Testing
Break
3: Prototype Demos
Rusty – process manager, job manager, service directory
Ron – Scalable Linux monitor
Eric – CPlant XML interface
JP – information service
Scott Jackson – QBank
5: Adjourn
Working groups may wish to get together in evening

13. Agenda – February 23 8:00 Breakfast
8: Discussion, proposals, strawvotes
Scott – Demo allocation manager
Rusty – Security wire protocol 8/3/3
Mike –monitoring method
Eric—XML issues
Naryan—Service directory
10: Break
11: Al Geist – Summary
next steps overall and for working groups
next meeting June Houston
12: meeting ends

14. Meeting notes Naryan – Service directory status
Ssslib – simple helper functions send_message, receive_message,
sd_register, sd_unregister
future – multi-protocol support
Node manager – functions: power up/down, boot/halt/ reboot,
getImage, setImage, rebuild node, configUpdate node
ORNL is working on a prototype due by next meeting
Information service – scalable data repository
intended to store well formed info from other components
data management and memory leaks are still being thought about
key-value pairs, vs. Db approach (this is perferred)
data has to be registered, and schemas need to be defined.
Discussion-why not use SQL? Are we reinventing the wheel?
PSC uses database and is completely integrated to their system.

15. Meeting notes Scott Jackson – Proposed component architecture diagrams
Creation of XML marshaller/unmarshaller
Establish of CVS repository at Ames
Scheduler progress – internal Resource manager API,
Allocation manager API
Initial support for checkpoint/restart – info it needs to know are:
what resources tied up, when last Checkpoiont done. Locality requirements.
Meta scheduler progress – support for data staging, proximity optimization
Uses globus RSL queries thus has ties to Grid
Job manager progress – initial study on PBS to determine viability of
Dissection possibilities and functionality enhancements.
Answer was NO, use all of PBS or use something else, don’t break up PBS
Allocation Manager progress – draft requirements document underway
prototype working, backend is SQL database. Page RMnotebook
Current issues—
Next work—all components under CVS, design XML interface to RM
scheduler demos by next mtg
Discussion of “metadata” and validation of XML schema

16. Meeting notes
Bigger questions- do we need SSS-wide CVS? Documentation?
Problem tracking? Bit-keeper? Faster than SourceForge.
Paul- XML is now a secondary issue, prototypes will sort it out
Refined boundaries with RM working group
Influencing the monitor discussion
Resurrect the job manager. Collect PM steps
Process manager – prototype by ANL and stub scheduler to feed it
complete set of interfaces defined
Checkpoint Manager – a separate component w/ five entry points
migration interface is now 2 phase
requirements document published as tech report.
hard copy handed out for comments
Monitors – two basic query types
NCSA studying implementation issues
initial capabilities will be PBS mon functionality
Data Migration – no interface work yet
would be invoked by Job Manager, could invoke PM

17. Meeting notes Next steps – continue work with RMwg
Interface work for process manager and checkpoint mgr
begin for job manager and monitors
Prototyping and refinement
Implementation survey report
Discussion of two delivery models compressed to one.
Single Method(metric, rate, threshhold, extended data)
Jose says “one more step and we are done”
Eric – XML proposed schema structure and style (proposal tomorrow)
Source repository – one or multiple?
Copyright of source. Is it accessible to public?
Nightly regression tests. Supported machines?
Discussion on options for source repository
Teleconference being set up – time is tentatively Wed 1:00 eastern

18. Meeting notes
Demos
Naryan – service directory started, process manager registers with sd
Start miniScheduler which finds PM and starts submitting jobs.
Uses basic wire protocol, and ssslib, and the XML interface
Next step- get RM group to supply the scheduler XML.
Eric- Secure Wire Protocol through XML and Browser
Dual mode
accepts XML and returns XML
accepts https request and returns HTML wrapped XML
OpenSSL with 128bit encryption, certificate server,
Security Plan can be written.
https Web page form has boxes (name) (password)
And text box to fill in XML (a default XML form is supplied)
Submitted a job on 2 nodes of Cplant
Next step-browser interface good (demos, GUI to Cplant, control console)

19. Meeting notes
Demos
Matt Sottile – Supermon: Scalable cluster monitoring
Reactive and periodic monitoring modes
Low Perturbation was a large focus
Hierarchical architecture of supermon
Describes the “S” (lisp-like) API
Shows performance graphs to 20 processors
750hz sample rate
Gives demo
Would like to get users
Al asks about how this could be used in scalable systems center
Ron says could make supermonXML component
And for scaling to 5000 processors build a k-way tree with k=50

20. Meeting notes Demos Scott Jackson – Qbank demo – didn’t work.
JP Navaro – information service prototype
Info service registers itself with service directory thru XML
Runs client who finds info service thru directory
Does query to show metadata contents of info service
Client puts in data with DeclareData(), then InsertData()
Wants to hear from WG how to make this more useful.
Stephen describes CCS needs for User management Db
Build configure group store node information
Paul asks about access control to prevent others from deleting
Long discussion on security and access

21. Meeting notes Day 2
Demo
Scott Jackson – Allocation manager basic operations
Next step building framework with allocations, people, machines, etc.
Proposals
Rusty – Basic Authentication to go with basic wire protocol
Classic Shared secret key challenge/response algorithm
Requires no machinery except Unix crypt or MD5
Question about password management and answer this is proposal
Just for wire protocol. No assumptions on password management.
Discussion of whether this is required for all components
Some thought the proposal should be stronger, others thought
It should be weaker (just basic wire protocol), some who abstained
wanted to it a while before deciding.
Proposal that basic wire protocol is augmented by a challenge/response
Strawvote – 8 for, 3 against, 3 abstain

22. Meeting notes Day 2 Proposals Mike – Monitoring
Gives his history of monitoring at NCSA
Gives live demo of NCSA Platinum Cluster Monitor
Looked at scalable protocol design (tested on 550 machines)
XML increases data volume by 4X
differential ASCII has lowest volume
Current design in the pm notebook (diagrams)
Single request method to cover event, streaming, polling, query
Straw vote to take this approach for developing XML interfaces
And components 12 for, 0 against, 1 abstain
Naryan – Service Directory
Problem: components need to locate each other and how to connect
SD allows components to register, deregistration, lookup
Name conflict – returns info about all matches
Straw vote to have service directory as part of architecture 13/0/1

23. Meeting notes Day 2 Jose asks:
RAS considerations – what happens if component doesn’t respond?
Discussion follows. Including high availability considerations.
Eric – XML issues
Multiple roles for XML schema
Global definitions in a Global schema – host, ports, authentication, etc
XML namespaces – propose
pm, shed, acct]
Proposed type names
f.e. host-type, env-type, stdio-type, args-type
Style Consistency –
decide later
Discussion – good idea to have a global namespace
need to consider version numbers
Straw vote 12 for, 0 against, 2 abstain