This guide replaces the previous Administrator's Guide for PoC R3.
This guide is meant for system administrators who wish to install the PoC Release 3.1 on a grid infrastructure. Users who want to use the PoC probable don't need to install it themselves. It is already available on
so make sure that none of these suit your needs before trying to install the PoC. If not, follow the instructions for installing a user interface (UI).
The PoC is a collection of RPMs, which will mostly install in
/opt/vl-e, /etc/opt/vl-e and
/var/opt/vl-e. It consists of popular scientific
software tools and some grid middleware, but a typical A PoC node
does not require any running services.
The RPMs do depend on several other packages, as listed below.
This section gives a list of things that are required in order to be able to install the PoC; its purpose is to give the administrator some idea of what kind of machine to install on, and what she may expect to find on a machine once the installation is complete. The next section explains the installation steps, which are fairly simple if Yum is used as a package manager.
The PoC is tested and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 derivatives (here collectively called RHEL). These derivatives are rebuilds of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources with minimal changes. Such distributions include CentOS and Scientific Linux. Mind that the actual Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution is not free, you need to licence it from Red Hat.
The supported architecture is x86_64; some packages are actually i386 packages left over from the previous release for RHEL4; these are provided for backward compatibility.
Other RPM based distributions may or may not work, in any case there is no support for them.
The PoC R3.1 software works in combination with Java JDK 1.6. The one that is shipped with RHEL5 is openjdk1.6, which should work fine.
The previous release used some JPackage packages; these have been incorporated
in the main RHEL5 distribution so a separate installation of the JPackage repositories
is no longer necessary. We strongly discourage the use of JPackage as there is
a conflict with log4j in the JPackage 5.0 release.
The PoC is intended to be installed alongside a larger collection of middleware called gLite 3.2. The gLite distribution is the standard grid middleware layer for the EGEE grid; it comes in various subsets for different types of nodes. The only real dependency is on the torque package, but you may provide this by other means.
If PoC R3 is installed on a cluster, make sure you publish this
information in the BDII. With YAIM, this is done by adding the tag
nl.vl-e.poc-release-3 to the CE_RUNTIMEENV
variable in site-info.def.
This guide does not cover installation and configuration of gLite 3.2. The PoC distribution can be installed before or after gLite, it should not make any difference. The only exception is a package called vle-vo-support, which requires a glite-UI installation and which depends on YAIM to (re)configure the node on installation. This package is meant for strictly VL-e UIs.
The disk space requirements for installing the PoC are as follows:
| Worker node installation: | 3.4 GB |
| User interface installation: | 3.8 GB |
The PoC can be installed with Yum, the standard Red Hat installation manager. Add vle.repo to /etc/yum.repos.d/.
cd /etc/yum.repos.d wget http://poc.vl-e.nl/distribution/3.1/extra/vle.repo
All the VL-e packages are signed with the "P4 Release Manager" key. You can import the key in RPM. Yum will prompt to import the key on first installation. Likewise, the JPackage RPMs are signed with the JPackage key.
rpm --import http://poc.vl-e.nl/distribution/3.1/extra/RPM-GPG-KEY-vle
There are two meta-RPMs, that contain no files themselves, but will
trigger Yum to automatically install all the required packages
through their dependencies. The vle3-ui package is
meant to be installed on UIs, and contains the most complete set of
software, while the vle3-wn is meant for WNs and leaves
out some of the GUI packages.
yum install vle3-wnor
yum install vle3-wn
You don't need to rely on Yum to install the PoC. With a certain set of base RHEL packages, you can install the PoC with straight RPMs. You can browse the entire repository.
alsa-lib antlr binutils blas chkfontpath compat-libf2c-34 compat-libstdc++-33 cpp expat fontconfig freeglut freetype gcc gcc-c++ gcc-gfortran gd giflib gjdoc glibc-devel glibc-headers gmp gnuplot java-1.4.2-gcj-compat java-1.6.0-openjdk java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel jpackage-utils junit jzlib kernel-headers lapack lcms libFS libICE libICE libSM libSM libX11 libXau libXcursor libXdmcp libXext libXfixes libXfont libXft libXi libXinerama libXmu libXpm libXrandr libXrender libXt libXt libXtst libXxf86vm libart_lgpl libdrm libfontenc libgcj libgfortran libgfortran libgomp libjpeg libmng libpng libstdc++ libstdc++-devel libtiff libtool-ltdl log4j mesa-libGL mesa-libGLU mesa-libOSMesa ncurses perl perl-Compress-Zlib perl-HTML-Parser perl-HTML-Tagset perl-URI perl-XML-Parser perl-libwww-perl pkgconfig qt tcl tclx tk tk ttmkfdir urw-fonts xml-commons xml-commons-apis xorg-x11-font-utils xorg-x11-xfs zip
The list of files for the VL-e PoC 3.1: (the files marked [*] are for the UI only)
fsl_4.0 fsl_4.0-bin fsl_4.0-data fsl_4.0-extras fsl_4.0-lib fsl_4.1 fsl_4.1-bin fsl_4.1-data fsl_4.1-extras fsl_4.1-lib gat_1.8-adaptors gat_1.8-cpp-wrapper gat_1.8-engine gat_1.8-python-wrapper graphviz_2.18 gt_4.0 ibis_1.4 itk_3.14 itk_3.4 javagat_1.7 lam_7.1-devel lam_7.1-extras lam_7.1-runtime lucene_2.3 matlabmpi_1.2 mesa3d_6.4 mpitb_2.1 mricro_1.39 octave_2.1 openmpi_1.3 openrdf-sesame_2.0 pl_5.6 r_2.6 r_2.9 rmpi_0.5 srb_3.4-client vle-config-gt4 vle-modules vle3 vlet_1.0 vtk_4.4 vtk_5.4 weka_3.4 compat-readline43 fsl_4.0-fslview [*] fsl_4.1-fslview [*] kepler_1.0 [*] lam_7.1-docs [*] paraview_3.2 [*] srb_3.4-devel [*] taverna_1.7 [*]
The simplest way to see if the installation succeeded is to run rpm -qa and
compare the list with the above list of required packages. Another simple test is to try
the module command.
module avail
This should show a list of modulefiles to load.
Each package in the PoC has the version number incorporated in the name of the package. This is done in order to enable side-by-side installation of different versions of the same package. Without making the names unique in this way, it would be impossible to install VTK version 4.4 and 5.0 simultaneously.
The release number of the meta-package indicates which build of the PoC is installed; this number corresponds with the precise builds of all the packages. The latest build is always posted on the release notes page; new builds are released at irregular intervals as bugs are found and security updates are applied.
Updates are announced through the appropriate VL-e channels. In Yum installations, it should then suffice to run
yum update
to get the latest updates installed. In other installations, updated packages will have to be collected from the repository itself.
The package vle-modules is the only package that impacts
the behaviour of the system, as it installs extra profile settings:
/etc/profile.d/modules.sh /etc/profile.d/modules.csh
These will be loaded for every login shell, and enable the use of
the module command for
package-specific configuration of the environment (More information
is in the user's guide). Sites that
already use modules should replace these file by scripts to
incorporate the VL-e modulefile directory in the existing setup.
Report all problems to grid.support@nikhef.nl.
