Virtual Laboratory for e-Science

PoC Software Distribution

• About the PoC software distribution
• Installation instructions
• Documentation
• Release notes
• Support
• Previous release PoC R3.

About the PoC software distribution

Note: these are the notes for the current release PoC R3.1; the previous release is PoC R3.

The VL-e Proof-of-Concept software distribution is a collection of tools for e-science on the grid, especially for use in the VL-e project. This collection is composed of open source tools and in-house developments to support the broad range of sciences that VL-e embraces. The PoC distribution is meant both for the grid infrastructure (worker nodes) and for user interface machines, to make sure the same versions of the software are used everywhere.

Installation

The PoC distribution can be installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x86_64 or compatible systems. It consists of a collection of RPMs that can be installed with yum.

The following steps cover just about everything you need to do to get a fully operation grid User Interface.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://poc.vl-e.nl/distribution/3.1/extra/vle.repo
wget http://poc.vl-e.nl/distribution/3.1/extra/lcg-CA.repo
wget http://poc.vl-e.nl/distribution/3.1/extra/glite-UI.repo
yum install vle3-ui
yum install lcg-CA
yum install glite-UI
yum install vle-vo-support

Alternatively, if the objective is not to install a UI, but just the VL-e middleware (e.g. on a worker node), just add the vle.repo file and install the vle3-wn metapackage. This contains mostly the same software, but it will skip some of the GUI packages that don't make sense on worker nodes.

More detailed instructions are given in the Administrator's Guide.

Documentation

• The VL-e PoC User's Guide
• The VL-e PoC Administrator's Guide
• The VL-e Resource Guide is an out-to-date guide to the available grid resources. [complain!]

Release Notes

The latest release of the PoC R3.1 is R3.1 Build 12, released on June 10, 2010 (Release Notes). The build number can be determined by running

  rpm -q vle3 

which will return vle3-3.1-12vle3.1rhel5, where the build number is highlighted.

The PoC distribution has a new major release every 9 to 12 months. Between major releases there are minor updates to fix bugs and security issues.

Notable changes in this release

• vle-modules has been modified to fix a problem with #!/bin/sh shell scripts.

Support

• Questions about the software

  The PoC distribution is built and maintained by the VL-e P4 team. Questions about the distribution can be sent to vle-pfour-team@lists.vl-e.nl.

• Questions about the infrastructure

  As always, questions regarding the infrastructure go to grid.support@{nikhef,sara}.nl.

• Software updates

  Security fixes and bug fixes are irregularly published to the updates section of the repositories. These updates will be announced through the proper VL-e channels.