Cortex
Cortex is a computation rack for VisLab humanoid robots. It contains 7 machines:
- 1 server that manages startup, shutdown and the file system of the clients;
- 6 clients (named
cortex1
...cortex6
) that run user processes.
All clients numbered 1 to 5 mount the same file system. Therefore, performing changes in the file system of cortex[1-5] will reflect to all other four clients.
The client cortex6
is separate for now, because it runs a 64 bit Linux.
Network setup
Connectivity
Cortex machines are connected to Cortex Switch, that links to VisLab switch with a fiber optic connection of 4Gbit/s.
Cortex nodes
Cortex server and clients have the following IPs and domain names:
- Server: 10.10.1.240, server.visnet
- Client 1: 10.10.1.1, cortex1.visnet
- Client 2: 10.10.1.2, cortex2.visnet
- Client 3: 10.10.1.3, cortex3.visnet
- Client 4: 10.10.1.4, cortex4.visnet
- Client 5: 10.10.1.5, cortex5.visnet
- Client 6: 10.10.1.6, cortex6.visnet
For further details, see the Vislab#Network and the VisLab network articles.
Additional setup
Server machine
The server has:
- a boot folder for the clients at
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
. It contains the files:default
- default boot file;- <mac_address> - specific for a machine with the given mac address.
- startup scripts for each machine at
/nfsroot/app
Client machines
The clients have:
- A superuser account (
compurack
) to administer system-wide settings (configurations, libraries, etc.) - Normal user accounts. By default, the login script runs the contents of file
$HOME/.bash_env
, where users can set their environment variables, e.g.,export ICUB_ROOT=$HOME/iCub
. This works for both interactive shell sessions and non-interactive ones (i.e., commands remotely invoked byyarprun
). - A
yarp
account to update and install the YARP library. VariableYARP_ROOT
is set by default to/home/yarp/yarp2
for all users (in/etc/bash.bashrc
) <-- change this? - An
icub
account with sudo privileges (created withsudo adduser icub admin
on 2009-06-30).
System-wide libraries and repositories
YARP
Presently (November 2010), the yarp2 SVN repository is installed under user yarp
(with sudo make install
), last updated on 13-July-2010.
iCub
Presently (November 2010), the iCub SVN repository is installed under user icub
(with sudo make install
), last updated on 13-July-2010.
There was a conflict with iKin, which could not find libipopt.so.0
, but it is now fixed thanks to setting the environment variable
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/Ipopt-3.5.5-linux-x86_32-gcc4.2.4/lib/
into /home/icub/.bash_env
.
One module has been disabled in the CMakeList.txt file, because it was not compiling properly: crawling.
Other libraries, manually installed
Please list here the system-wide libraries and applications that were installed by the superuser, especially the ones that do not have a clean 'make install' procedure but were manually installed into /opt
:
- ARToolKit
- Ipopt-3.5.5-linux-x86_32-gcc4.2.4
CMake 2.6 does not come with the version of Ubuntu currently installed, but it is needed by the latest version of yarp, so we installed it via this archive.
- cmake 2.6
Other libraries, cleanly installed
These packages were installed with apt-get install
libncurses5-dev libace-dev libgsl0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libglademm-2.4-dev glew-utils libglew1.5-dev libglut-dev
OpenCV:
THE REPOSITORY IS NOW IN SVN FORM, WE NEED TO UPDATE THIS. cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@opencvlibrary.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/opencvlibrary co -P opencv cd opencv ./configure make make install add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf
User repositories
RE-THINK THIS POLICY (plus, we installed iCub svn):
Each user should manage its own repositories, e.g. the iCub repository: <-- then we shouldn't have done sudo make install here :)
cvs -d vislab@cvs.robotcub.org:/cvsroot/robotcub co iCub
then you should add <iCub>/bin to your PATH by editing your ~/.bashrc like this:
PATH=$PATH:~/iCub/bin/ ICUB_DIR=~/iCub/ <-- needs to change export ICUB_DIR ICUB_ROOT=$ICUB_DIR export ICUB_ROOT
You should also edit ~/.bash_env adding these lines:
export ICUB_DIR=$HOME/iCub <-- needs to change export ICUB_ROOT=$ICUB_DIR
this is needed when you connect non-interactively via ssh to a Cortex computer, for instance when execute a "yarp run ..." on a Cortex, from Chico2.
Be aware that Ubuntu 7.10 (the version currently installed on the cluster) has a conflict with iKin, specifically with iCub/conf/FindIPOPT.cmake (used by iKin): for now, in order to compile iKin, change the following line of FindIPOPT.cmake from
SET(IPOPT_LIB ${IPOPT_LIB} gfortranbegin gfortran)
to
SET(IPOPT_LIB ${IPOPT_LIB} gfortran)
Other configuration
Subversion
We have set the following parameter in /etc/subversion/config
:
store-passwords = no
This implies that SVN will ask you for your password every time you do a commit. (Don't worry about changing your personal ~/.subversion/config
file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc
setting is used.)
Network tuning
sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=8388608 sysctl -w net.core.wmem_max=8388608 sysctl -w net.core.rmem_default=65536 sysctl -w net.core.wmem_default=65536 sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_rmem='4096 87380 8388608' sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_wmem='4096 65536 8388608' sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_mem='8388608 8388608 8388608' sysctl -w net.ipv4.route.flush=1
Prompt ($PS1)
The prompt is set to "user@cortex?:pwd$" in /etc/bash.bashrc. With those settings, if you log in to Cortex1, the prompt will be "user@cortex1:~$".
We chose to do so because sometimes it's convenient to have the number of the Cortex machine you're working on embedded in the prompt.
By default, though, this configuration is overridden in the users' ~/.bashrc file, and the prompt is set to "user@source" regardless of the Cortex machine you log in to.
If you want to inhibit this behaviour in ~/.bashrc and thus have a prompt like "user@cortex?:pwd", just comment these lines in your ~/.bashrc:
# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color) case "$TERM" in xterm-color) PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' ;; *) PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ' ;; esac
However, for users created after 2009-05-07, the prompt is already set to "user@cortex?:pwd$" by default.
Helper commands
- Check the kernel: uname -m
- Check the file versions: file
- Set bash shell in /etc/passwd
- Check disk space: du –sh /home
- Check per-user processes: ps -U <user>