Lark

Introduction

Lark was a NSF-funded project for adding network-awareness to HTCondor's High Throughput Computing approach.

Broadly, it can be split into three major areas:

Results and Products Produced

Work on Lark started on Yr 2013 and completed in Yr 2015.

Read about more about Lark results via published research papers, such as

Lark produced code for a pluggable HTCondor contrib module, with plans to merge much of this code (currently on git branch V8_2-lark-branch) into production HTCondor during the v8.5 or v8.7 developer series.

Advanced Network Testbed (ANT)

The ANT consists of small HTCondor pools at Nebraska and Wisconsin. These are meant to test Lark technologies and harden existing advanced HTCondor network technologies.

Example ANT use cases include:

Personnel responsible: Garhan Attebury, Alan DeSmet

Network Monitoring

HTCondor is relatively uninformed of the underlying network conditions. For example, its queuing is based on the number of concurrent file transfers, regardless of whether the underlying network is 100Mbps or 100 Gbps.

The network monitoring task will work on gathering data from the perfSONAR boxes in the DYNES project and pushing them into a HTCondor collector.

From there, the schedd would be able to utilize this information to better adjust its concurrent file transfers.

Personnel responsible: Dan Bradley (schedd changes), Unassigned (perfSONAR integration)

Network Management

We are adding the ability for HTCondor to directly manipulate the network configuration for jobs.

In particular, a pair of network pipe devices is created for each job. Using Linux's network namespace feature, the job only can access one of the network pipe devices. The other end of the network pipe device is configured to utilize the host's network. By having HTCondor manage the external network pipe device's configuration, we manage every aspect of the job's network.

Lark's technologies allow for users to specify a desired network policy and the starter to execute the desired configuration. See the developer documentation below for more information about what can be configured.

Personnel responsible: Zhe Zhang, Brian Bockelman

PIVOT outreach

The PIVOT project is an outreach project based at UNL. It provides small HTC clusters for colleges in the state of Nebraska, along with training for students, faculty, and IT professionals on how to manage and utilize compute clusters for research computing.

Lark is providing advanced network training for those involved in the PIVOT project. In particular, we have the following goals:

Personnel responsible: Carl Lundestedt, Brian Bockelman

Development Documentation

Attachments: