Cluster Management in VisLab

Cluster Manager (description on LIRA-Lab wiki) is a Python-based GUI that lets a user check and influence the status of "yarp run" on a cluster of computers.

Usage and configuration of Cluster Manager

To run Cluster Manager, just go to $ICUB_DIR/app/default/scripts and run

 ./icub-cluster.py 

by default, it reads configuration information from $ICUB_DIR/app/default/icub-cluster.xml. We changed it to read configuration information from $ICUB_DIR/app/default/vislab-cluster.xml (TODO: make it so that we don't need to customize the copy icub-cluster.py from the iCub repository, possibly by passing the XML filename as a command-line parameter).

We had to write these two lines to ~/.bash_env on the Cortex machines (user icub) and on Chico2 (user icub), in order to have remote execution (i.e., non-interactive) with ssh to work:

 export ICUB_DIR=/home/icub/iCub
 export ICUB_ROOT=$ICUB_DIR

We had to create a /tmp/run directory on the Cortex machines (each one of them: these directories are different for each machine in the cluster!), belonging to user icub (it should be writable by anyone, but it probably isn't at the moment), so that "yarp run" could run there. The reason why this is needed is not clear at the moment: on pc104, such directory doesn't seem to exist. WARNING: the content of this directory might disappear when we restart the Cortex computers, possibly causing problems.

yarprun.sh script

The script $ICUB_DIR/scripts/yarprun.sh assumes that every machine has a unique name, obtainable with the command: "uname -n". As of 2009-05-12, this works on Cortex as well; for an explanation of how we enforced the desired behaviour on the cluster, see page Cluster Management in VisLab/Archive.