What's New

View new features for Accelerator 2021.2.0.

2021.2.0 Release Notes

New Features

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-12728 Accelerator CS0133915 Added new usage options to nc modify to allow an Admin to increase/decrease grabbed resourcemaps for running jobs and to allow selection of jobs for all nc modify use cases by specifying a selection rule.
VOV-12822 Accelerator None The web UI dashboard page has a Counters section that shows the number of active Users for an NC queue. This counter had been 0 in past releases. This has been fixed to show the correct value.
VOV-12955 Monitor None Jobclass initialization has been moved into the liveness script live_init_jobclasses.tcl instead of vovresourced.
VOV-12956 Accelerator None Timevar definitions are now processed in two configuration files. Timevar devinitions may be place now in new configuration file SWD/config/timevars.tcl, where they are processed by the new VOV liveness script. This new config file is the preferred place for Timevar definitions going forward. Timevar definitions in SWD/resources.tcl will also continue to be processed by vovresourced for compatibility with prior releases.
VOV-13090 Accelerator CS0141521 Support has been added to allow custom values to be used for PIPELOG related ports and range via VOV_PIPELOG_FIRST and VOV_PIPELOG_RANGE. Also VOV_CONTAINER_NETWORK_PROXY environment variable has been added to better support nested container resources, see example container config file containers/c3-enter.sh for more details.
VOV-13136 Accelerator Plus, Hero None Integrated Accelerator Plus and Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13137 Allocator, Accelerator None Integrated Allocator and Accelerator with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13625 Accelerator None Added new NUMUSERS field to the SERVER object. The new field contains the count of users who are currently connected to vovserver with a web or CLI client or a running job. Vovserver updates this field every 10s.
VOV-13654 Accelerator None In Dashboard UI, the server vital signs widget will have the donut under the bullet graph bars.
VOV-13774 Accelerator None By setting the new server configuration option, vovservermgr config slave.childProcessCleanupExclusions someChildDaemon in conjunction with setting vovservermgr config slave.childProcessCleanup 1, users can now specify by name named process exclusions to the child cleanup process. If set in conjunction with slave.childProcessCleanup, then slaves should kill all of a job's child processes when that job exits, except for those named here for slave.childProcessCleanupExclusions in a comma separated list. The default value if not set is empty string, "".
VOV-13806 All None The web server used to provide Accelerator products' web UI interface and HTTP interface to the main server is changed from the internal web server to nginx in this release. If the internal web server is preferred, it can be selected via the -webprovider option on the ncmgr start command. The impact to users will be that with the new default nginx web server, the REST v3 interface and the Accelerator administrator web UI dashboard page will not be available for use. If either of these capabilities are needed, you should select the internal web server option when the Accelerator queue is started.
VOV-13839 Accelerator None With the webport enabled and the webprovider set to "internal" to use the REST service, worker threads dedicated to servicing REST requests have a label of either "RESTService" or "RESTRequestHandler" This can be seen by calling ps -T -p PID with PID being the process id of vovserver.
VOV-13841 All None Added new liverecorder.mode configuration parameter for taskers that can be used to specify whether the main tasker process, the subtasker process, or both processes should generate a LiveRecorder recording file. Note that recording files will be generated per job that is executed if subtasker recording is enabled. The default mode is for the main tasker process to be the only one to generate a recording.
VOV-13947 All None The Installation Guide has been updated to include the information for the Altair License Manager.
VOV-13372 FlowTracer CS0182759 Enhanced Job status bar to show the colors for the valid and failed jobs based on their exit status. This functionality can be controlled by ::VovGUI::configJobStatusBar in the gui.tcl file. All valid jobs with assigned color will appear before default valid (green color), same for failed jobs.
VOV-13135 FlowTracer None Integrated Altair License Manager with FlowTracer for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13138 Hero None Integrated Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13133 Monitor None Integrated Altair License Manager with Monitor for both node-locked and floating licenses. Added a config key config(alm.enable) in policy.tcl to enable the ALM licensing. The default license manager for Monitor remains the Reprise License Manager (RLM).
VOV-13776 Monitor None Implemented Grace Period for Altair License Manager.
VOV-13778 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus None Implemented licensing modes 'Full' and 'N' for Altair License Manager for Accelerator and Accelerator Plus. This can be set using config key config(enterpriselicense) in policy.tcl.
VOV-13777 Monitor None Enhanced license UI to show Altair License Manager status and make changes to the current license environment.
VOV-13134 Allocator, Monitor, Accelerator None Updated Allocator, Monitor, and Accelerator with the actual (new) features names for Altair License Manager.
VOV-13617 All None The SSL implementation has been upgraded using the latest third party libraries, OpenSSL version 1.1.1.

Resolved Issues

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-12564 All None Changed default LiveRecorder log directory from . to /tmp. This mainly affects the default behavior for vovserver, whose working directory is the parent of the SWD, which is often stored in an NFS-based location.
VOV-12822 Accelerator None The web UI dashboard page has a Counters section that shows the number of active Users for an NC queue. This counter had been 0 in past releases. This has been fixed to show the correct value.
VOV-13180 All None Robustness changes to mitigate vovsh backtraces linked to query memory management.
VOV-12963 All CS0143849 Fixed issue that could cause object IDs to improperly recycle after multiple rollovers.
VOV-13950 All None test.check_TIMEVAR.sh was primarily failing due to clock skew. This fixes that.
VOV-14075 All None Fix the internal web provider's HTTP responses to include security headers. Previously, the internal web provider did not correctly return the security headers in the following case: when HTTP requests were made to the vovserver web port, responses did not include the standard HTTP security headers for URLs beginning with "/doc".
VOV-7887 All 21377 Clarified documentation of VOV_LIMIT_vmemoryuse.
VOV-14143 All None Added missing vovservermgr.bat and vovclientmgr.bat scripts to the Windows package.
VOV-13183 All None Fixed a potential memory leak when a client running a long-running query is unexpectedly terminated, causing vovserver to permanently mark a query as "in-use".
VOV-14061 All None Fixed HTTP security header setting which prevented some icons to not appear in the Altair online documentation.
VOV-13921 Accelerator None In the past, when you changed an initJobClass procedure, you had to restart vovresourced to put the change into effect. Restarting vovresourced is no longer necessary. The online help has been reflected to show this.
VOV-13764 Accelerator None Changing http.proxytimeout requires the REST service be restarted if it is already running. This can be done by setting the webport to 0, waiting 30 seconds, and then setting it back to the desired webport number.
VOV-13380 Accelerator None If the vovserver web interface is enabled by setting the web port, then under some high load conditions the web port interface would hang up. In the 2021.2.0 release, the default web server reverts to nginx, which is immune to this issue. As a result, the default vovserver configuration will not support REST v3 or the Accelerator dashboard UI page. To enable REST v3 and the dashborad UI page, a new web server option may be specified by the -webprovider internal option on the ncmgr start or vovproject start commands.
VOV-13167 Accelerator None Memory reporting within the tools has changed on Linux to reflect what's reported by the Linux kernel in VmRSS rather than VmSize. The vovserver memory usage information from commands such as vsi, vovselect memorystats from server as well as the memory web page at "http://host:port/server?page=memory" will also report consistent memory use totals based on VmRSS. Also, vovselect memorystats from server and the memory statistics webpage have been enhanced to account for more of the "chunk" based memory pool allocations used within vovserver.
VOV-13531 Accelerator None A minor appearance improvement to the web dashboard UI page was made within the Capacity sub-window.
VOV-13326 Accelerator None Changed the VOV_DISABLE_SHARED_MEMORY_LOOKUP behavior to return the RSS.
VOV-13769 Accelerator None When using the internal REST server (as opposed to the nginx server), the vendor library used to implement it was changed from cpprestsdk to Oat++. The back end no longer allocates a static pool of worker threads to service requests, controlled by the variable http.workerthreads. That parameter is now ignored. The Oat++ backend creates a new thread to service each request and terminates the thread after sending the response to the HTTP/REST client.
VOV-13638 Accelerator CS0191754 The RESD(typeList) parameter in the vovreconciled/config.tcl file can be used to modify the license types handled by vovreconciled. The parameter value is a list of names, by default the value is {License}. The following types are not supported and will be ignored if present: Limit, Policy, User, Group and Priority. The type of License will be added if not specified.
VOV-13549 Accelerator None Fixed script execution issue with message.cgi where user did not have proper permissions to modify the underlying file, UI will now display message indicating the issue and properly disable the submit button.
VOV-13561 Accelerator None Internal bug which may have caused some set statistics to not be reported accurately has been addressed in this release.
VOV-11780 Accelerator AAP24453 This release contains OpenSSL 1.1.1j which does not exhibit the warning message of the previous packaged version OpenSSl 1.0.2q.
VOV-13720 Accelerator None The header section stays sticky at the top and always be visible to the user.
VOV-13672 Accelerator None In the Scheduler Vital Signs widget, the values under the horizontal bars are now in sync with the values shown in tooltips, respectively (tooltips appear on hover over the horizontal bars).
VOV-13791 Accelerator None The REST HTTP server has a new threading model that no longer uses a pool of worker threads to service client connections. It now creates a new thread for each connection and that thread terminates after transmitting a response to the client. The vov variable http.workerthreads is deprecated. It is visible but not changeable.
VOV-13739 Accelerator None The Set Browser link has been modified to point to the classic UI's Set Browser page.
VOV-13816 Accelerator CS0205113 Address issue where license resources sometimes became unavailable when on life support.
VOV-14110 Accelerator AAP24923 Fixed bug where TaskerClass.table based resources did not display properly in web UIs extra resources column.
VOV-10345 Accelerator 24403, 24469, 24648 The following system taskers no longer consume a license: vovdbd, WXLauncher & maintainer.
VOV-12107 Accelerator CS0120865 Added cleanup of unknown process IDs which also fixes the flooding of tasker logs with the following error messages: "Must kill late child Pid...", "rakeChildren: Child process...", "does not exist anymore: assuming it is done..."
VOV-13510 Accelerator CS0182762 Fixed issue causing license checkout with empty shared (ISV) string which is resulting in duplicate license checkout.
VOV-13880 Accelerator None In the Schedular vital signs widget, the values shown in the tooltip of the buckets bullet graph will be in-sync with the number jobs submitted.
VOV-13860 Accelerator CS0208413, CS0208823 Fixed issue that caused the tasker to overload vovserver with messages when a job execution attempt failed due to not being able to successfully fork out the subtasker process that is used to shepherd the job.
VOV-9031 Accelerator 23103 A description on how to set up a tasker in Windows has been added to the online help.
VOV-13861 Accelerator CS0210064 Fixed issue in which SIGALRM interrupted communications on interactive jobs using VOV_INTERACTIVE_PING keep alive method
VOV-13771 Accelerator None When making job related REST API calls, helpful error information is included in the REST response. If using the vov_rest_v3 Python API wrapper, the content of the error will be thrown inside VovRestException.
VOV-13849 Accelerator CS0208895, CS0218919 Fixed bug where interactive (-I/-Ir) root privileged container jobs potentially resulted in a process group SIGINT being captured and accidentally being sent to systemd, following which bad things may happen, such as a system reboot on subtasker host.
VOV-14116 Accelerator None Fix a problem with changing the vovserver's webserver from "nginx" to "internal" using the vovservermgr config webprovider internal command. It was not possible to make this change without restarting vovserver, but with this fix, the transition from nginx to internal web server can be accomplished by a 3 step process: 1) shut down nginx with this command: vovdaemonmgr stop vovnginxd ; 2) delay 5 seconds with sleep 5; 3) start the internal web server with vovservermgr config webprovider internal.
VOV-13956 Accelerator Plus None Fixed race condition with Accelerator Plus that caused jobs to fail due to placement on taskers reserved for different buckets.
VOV-13785 Accelerator Plus CS0142115 Fixed issue that prevented jobs using a jobclass with VOV_JOB_DESC(interactive,useXdisplay) from succuessfully launching agents when run via Altair Accelerator.
VOV-13872 Accelerator Plus CS0211355 Fixed issue where SICK status Accelerator taskers were not removed after an appropriate amount of time. The underlying cause was that there were still related jobs running in the base queue, and was repaired by passing the -forcerunning option to the NC base queue forget command for taskers with a SICK status.
VOV-14020 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue with Accelerator Plus in DirectDrive mode that prevented jobs from running when added to a bucket that was empty during a vovwxd daemon restart.
VOV-13731 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue which prevented Accelerator Plus in Direct Drive mode from launching taskers for preexisting jobs when a base queue is restarted and no further jobs are incoming in the Accelerator Plus queue.
VOV-13917 Accelerator Plus None Improved logging to identify when Altair Accelerator Direct Drive feature is in use. On vovwxd startup, the vovwxd.log will contain: Initializing vovwxd with Direct Drive... ... vovwxd with Direct Drive initialization successful. During operation, the vovwxd.log will also contain the thread identifier "APPluginAccel" when running in Direct Drive mode.
VOV-13890 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue which prevented WX taskers from reconnecting after server freeze/failover with fastexit enabled.
VOV-13650 Accelerator Plus None vovserver has a new config parameter tasker.authorization.delay that specifies the time in seconds that the server wait before authorizing new taskers.This parameter can be useful for WX, where it can reduce the latency of dispatching a job to a newly requested tasker.
VOV-13749 FlowTracer None Fixed issue in vov_lsf_agent that prevented it from launching a tasker.
VOV-8715 Monitor 22305 Send warning about nonexistent user to stderr instead of stdout when ftlm_batch_report with user filter is requested
VOV-13464 Monitor CS0174914 Added ADJUST_CAPACITY periodic maintenance task (Admin > System > Configuration Information).
VOV-13633 Monitor CS0188846 Logs containing, "Queued Programs" were not being recorded as queued requests properly for ftlm_parse_lstc.
VOV-13712 Monitor CS0195003 A denial plot showed incorrect data when the data binning size was 30s and the time span was several months.
VOV-13927 Monitor None Fixed issue that prevented ControlCenter jobs from executing on hosts that have an upper/mixed-case name.
VOV-13929 Monitor None Fixed issue that prevented the process monitoring facility from recording incoming running processes as checkouts.
VOV-7800 Monitor 21302, 23839 Fixed issue that caused the default bin interval for the denial plot to default to 30s instead of a dynamically calculated optimum value for the report time range. This caused the denials to be binned incorrectly for reports with time ranges that would result in more than 100k bins unless an explicit interval was specified in the report options. Protections were also added to prevent the acceptance of a bin interval that is too short for the report time range (any value that would result in more than 100k bins).
VOV-9665 Monitor 23904 Fixed issue that prevented the ftlm_capacity load operation from finding the data files necessary for loading feature capacity information into the database.
VOV-10568 None CS0120645 HyperThreading fieldname 'HT' on taskers previously reported incorrectly if HT was available. The field now properly reports if SMT threading (either Intel HyperThreading or AMD SMT) is currently available and enabled by checking value of either /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control or /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/topology/thread_siblings_list (or equivalent). directly.
VOV-13611 All CS0120932 Resolved issue with parsing and filtering via selection rules values that may contain uint64 fields compared with hardcoded integer values. Additionally, users may now explicitly declare uint64 hardcoded values such as vovselect name,totalspace,freespace -from filesystems -where 'totalspace>1U AND freespace>1U'
VOV-13689 Accelerator None The Running-jobs axis scale numbers have been placed with an even space.
VOV-14209 Accelerator CS0236878 Fixed an issue with temporary loss of key file license registration by vovserver when the enterpriselicense configuration parameter was not explicitly set in policy.tcl. In these cases a vovproject sanity resulted in a temporary switch to RLM licensing. Some specific low level changes made were as follows:
  1. Check for the presence of a license key file at server startup so that the default enterprise license mode will be "Off" if a key file is found and the policy.tcl file does not have an explicit setting for the mode.
  2. Prevent the above check upon every request to check licensing so that the mode doesn't switch unless manually requested.
  3. Allow for switching the mode out of "Off".
  4. Restore the mode control and license request sections in license.cgi when the mode is "Off".
  5. Rename the mode selection in the license.cgi drop-down menu to "Off (use license key file)" so that the actual value is represented along with the intent.
VOV-14180 Accelerator, Monitor   Fixed a bug that arose when SSL certificate files were added by the admin with file names correctly derived from the fully qualified host name from VOV_HOST_HTTP_NAME. The Accleratorator products would not initialize the webport and the web UI URL properly when the "internal" webprovider was activated.

2021.2.0 Supported Platforms

Supported Operating Systems

Table 1. x86_64 Architecture
Operating System Version Altair Package
Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL 6.x, 7.x, 8.x linux64.tar
CentOS 6.x, 7.x, 8.x linux64.tar
SLES 12.x, 15.x linux64.tar
Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04 linux64.tar
Amazon Linux 2 linux64.tar
Windows 1 7, 8, 10 win64.tar
Windows Server 1 2012, 2012R2, 2016, 2019 win64.tar
Table 2. ARM64 Architecture
Operating System Version Altair Package
Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL 7.x, 8.x armv8.tar
CentOS 7.x, 8.x armv8.tar
Amazon Linux 2 armv8.tar
Note: On ARM64, only Accelerator execution hosts and submit hosts are supported.

Supported Browsers

Table 3.
Browser Supported
Safari 10.x + Yes
FireFox 55.x+ Yes
Chrome 60.x+ Yes
Edge (current version) Yes

Previous Releases

2020.1.0 Release

New Features and Enhancements

The following new features and enhancements were introduced this software release:

Product(s) Case Number Internal Number Description
All VOV-11377 A new document viewer for the Accelerator product family is provided in the web UI. This document viewer provides a modernized interface with new client-side search capability.
All VOV-11059 Field descriptions have been populated for all supported fields. These can be queried via the "fieldesc" metadata field, available for each object.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0121103 VOV-12279 The output of nc info and wx info now includes the project/queue name.
Accelerator VOV-11378 A modernized web UI dashboard page has been added to the Accelerator web UI. To access the page, browse to the URL generated by this command: nc cmd vovbrowser -url /dashboard. ADMIN privileged users may access this dashboard.
Accelerator 24397 VOV-10124 The following commands nc run, vovset resources, nc modify -res, now support binary unit conversion for all memory based resources as a convenience from Petabytes (PB), Terabyte (TB), or Gigabyte (GB) to Megabytes (MB), which is still used internally and reported by all commands. The input conversion will accept either decimal or integer form and are all case-insensitive, so for example both nc run -r RAM/0.1Tb — sleep 0 and nc run -r SWAP/1GB — sleep 0 are supported. The currently supported parameter names for which this conversion is supported are RAM/, RAM#, RAMFREE#, RAMFREE/, RAMTOTAL#, RAMFREE/, SWAP/, SWAP#, SWAPFREE#, SWAPFREE/, SWAPTOTAL#, SWAPTOTAL/ and TMP# or TMP/. By default the unit is MB (Megabytes), where 1MB is 1<<20 bytes.
Accelerator 24092, 24093 VOV-9830 Added confirmation WebUI dialogs for MakeDefault and ClearDefault job class - Writing MakeDefault and ClearDefault job class events to server log
Accelerator 23068, 23767, 23914, 24923 VOV-9778 Irrelevant alerts are no longer generated. Addressed some implementation issues with vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags. Note that calls to vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags are cumulative and override any tags added with vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all. The -noooq parameter for vtk_flexlm_monitor has no impact at present, please use vovresSetFlags instead. The -order parameter to vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all only orders any specified tags, it no longer adds tags (use -tags to add tags). The optional parameters vovResource, vovMap to vtk_flexlm_monitor are now handled correctly.
Accelerator 21777 VOV-8055 Added a new capability to limit the number of interactive jobs that can run concurrently, both at the global and user levels. This is accomplished by creating a limit resource and setting is as the interactive job limit in the vncrun.config.tcl configuration file. For example: set VOV_JOB_DESC(interactive,limit) Limit:interactive or for per-user a limit: set VOV_JOB_DESC(interactive,limit) Limit:interactive_@USER@ The resource must exist prior to adding these lines to the file.
Accelerator 23067 VOV-9017 MAXCPUPROGRESS now provides the maximum sampled percentage of CPU time as an integer used by a job, including all its children, which can be greater than 100 if the job is utilizing multiple cores.
Accelerator 23265 VOV-9130 Added the -sickslave parameter to the vovinvalidate command, to invalidate running/retracing jobs that are no longer attached to a slave.
Accelerator 21342 VOV-7811 Added ability to provide a stop reason when stopping jobs via the web UI.
Accelerator VOV-12458 Implemented Dialpad menu for mobile screens.
All VOV-11323 vovdoc CLI utility is retired
All VOV-11454 vov_rest_v3.py is the new Python module used to make v3 REST API requests against vovserver.
All VOV-11251 Accelerated processing of Crash Recovery file.
All VOV-10844 Provide a REST API addition to allow job control. The following operations can be performed via the v3 REST API: 1. Dispatch 2. Forget 3. Preempt 4. Rerun 5. Resume 6. Suspend
All VOV-10964 Job attributes can now be modified via the v3 REST API in ways that are also possible via the command line with nc modify.

Resolved Issues

The following issues were resolved in this release.

Product(s) Case Number Internal Number Description
All VOV-5570 Fixed behavior of the ROWCOUNT field used by vovselect and related commands; vovselect will print "0" instead of an empty string when there are no rows in the query, and will print a correct count instead of 0 for "vovselect rowcount from objects".
All   VOV-12721 Fixed an issue with the 2020.1.0 beta that caused a user to be logged out of a web session for one product when the user logged into a different product session in the same browser.
All 24114 VOV-9853 When determining if a shell is configured for a project, the environment variables VOV_PROJECT_NAME and VOV_HOST_NAME must be set. New checks were added to ensure the values of these variables may not be empty strings and may not be set to "unknown".
All CS0120819 VOV-12027 Add the previously missing documentation for the vovlicensemgr command.
All VOV-12583 Fixed an issue where querying for "maxnumacores" was returning the total number of cores in the system instead of the maximum number of cores in a NUMA node.
Accelerator 25220 VOV-11515 Added a new server configuration parameter, tasker.uninterruptableSignalCascades, that controls whether taskers should process incoming job control requests when there is an existing signal cascade being processed. If TRUE, taskers will ignore incoming job control requests if an existing request is in-process and a message will be printed to the slave log indicating as such. Default is FALSE.
Accelerator VOV-10850 NUMA support has been updated to work correctly on systems configured with the number of sockets unequal to the number of NUMA nodes (Click here for an example). On such systems, the earlier implementation would report the number of NUMA nodes and associated memory incorrectly. The earlier implementation could also result in degraded memory performance if a socket has more than 1 NUMA node.
Accelerator 21578, 24177 VOV-7947 Fix a failure to remove an Accelerator job's pre-command and post-command script log files by the command nc clean.
Accelerator 22946, 29901 VOV-8975 The output of nc getfield JOB cputime with a lowercase cputime is changed to be the integer accumulated CPU time for a job scaled in milliseconds. This is now consistent with the output of nc getfield JOB CPUTIME with an uppercase CPUTIME field name.
Accelerator 21073 VOV-5439 Execution information shows, "job has never run" instead of epoch dates for jobs that have not run yet.
Accelerator 24894 VOV-11041 Large v2 REST queries that produced no results have been fixed in the v3 REST API.
Note: The problem still persists with v2, the fix is in v3 only.
Accelerator VOV-11261 Addressed issue where delays were encountered due to vovserver not being immediately notified of an update.
Accelerator VOV-12337 Fixed timing issue with nc wait command when run immediately after submitting multiple jobs in background mode using nc run command
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0120716 VOV-12305 Fixed issue that prevented the wxagent job in an Accelerator base queue from reflecting the job placement policy and priority of the user's job in an Accelerator Plus queue.
Accelerator 25247 VOV-11657 Performance of vovselect and related Tcl commands has been improved in general, as well as specific enhancements for the ID field in all tables, and the WHY and FairShare-related fields in JOBS.
Accelerator CS0120864 VOV-12023 Jobs that have been autokilled no longer show duplicate autokill reasons in the job status explanation.
Accelerator VOV-12032 The integrated REST HTTP server now has a separate log under SWD/logs/httpserver.log.
Accelerator CS0120906, CS0121020 VOV-12030 Fixed issue that caused taskers to be killed with the message “Tasker instructed to exit brutally”. This also fixes server messages like “Cannot find tasker rdc-cad-svr12 (illegal id 365667285) pid=32830"
Accelerator VOV-12560 Fixed nc stop -after option, which was not waiting for the specified number of seconds before issuing the stop request.
Accelerator CS0127402 VOV-12628 Fixed a bug where License: was prepended the resource name if the resource parameter was specified in vtk_flexlm_monitor, even if the resource name already started with License:.
Accelerator VOV-12543 Fixed a crash in vovserver caused by trying to select a job graph or node graph field from a set by name, e.g. "vovselect NODEGRAPH from System:jobs".
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus, Monitor 24282 VOV-10682 Features names such as set via vtkle_feature_set can now include the '+' character and will be handled properly via the web UI.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0121177 VOV-12403 Fixed an issue where NUMA jobs that span multiple NUMA nodes would not return all cores used by the job to the free pool on job completion.
None 25011 VOV-11221 Monitor email notifications set in the Admin->Notifications UI page using legacy mode email delivery had failed to successfully deliver email to the recipient.
All VOV-10844 Provide a REST API addition to allow job control. The following operations can be performed via the v3 REST API: 1. Dispatch 2. Forget 3. Preempt 4. Rerun 5. Resume 6. Suspend
All VOV-10913 Fixed a bug that caused vovselect to issue an error when requesting the field "env" in all lowercase.
All VOV-9988 Made the WHY property more prominent in the Main Reasons section of the output of vsy and related commands for FAILED jobs.
Accelerator 22097 VOV-8599 See VOV-11848.

2021.1.1-p1 Release Notes

Resolved Issues

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-13861 Accelerator CS0210064 Fixed issue in which SIGALRM interrupted communications on interactive jobs using VOV_INTERACTIVE_PING keep alive method.
VOV-13860 Accelerator CS0208413, CS0208823 Fixed issue that caused the tasker to overload vovserver with messages when a job execution attempt failed due to not being able to successfully fork out the subtasker process that is used to shepherd the job.
VOV-13816 Accelerator CS0205113 Addressed an issue where license resources sometimes became unavailable when on life support.
VOV-13849 Accelerator CS0208895, CS0218919 Fixed bug where interactive (-I/-Ir) root privileged container jobs potentially resulted in a process group SIGINT being captured and accidentally being sent to systemd, following which bad things may happen, such as a system reboot on subtasker host.
VOV-13890 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue which prevented wx taskers from reconnecting after server freeze/failover with fastexit enabled.
VOV-13872 Accelerator Plus CS0211355 Fixed issue where SICK status Accelerator taskers were not removed after an appropriate amount of time. The underlying cause was that there were still related jobs running in the base queue, and was repaired by passing the -forcerunning option to the NC base queue forget command for taskers with a SICK status.

2021.1.1 Release Notes

New Features

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-13210 Accelerator None Added functionality to perform actions on sets in the Set Browser page.
VOV-12810 Accelerator None The dashboard UI job graph shows actual Y values when user hover the mouse over the graphed lines, and at the intersection points of the graph lines in job plot graph, the tooltip will show the Y-axis values which are intersected.
VOV-12780 Accelerator 24397 The commands nc run, vovset resources, and nc modify -res support binary unit conversion for all memory based resources as a convenience from Petabytes (PB), Terabyte (TB), or Gigabyte (GB) to Megabytes (MB), which is still used internally and reported by all commands. The input conversion will accept either decimal or integer form and are all case-insensitive, so for example both nc run -r SWAP/1GB sleep 0, and nc run -r RAM/0.1Tb sleep 0 are supported. The currently supported parameter names for which this conversion is supported are RAM/, RAM#, RAMFREE#, RAMFREE/, RAMTOTAL#, RAMFREE/, SWAP/, SWAP#, SWAPFREE#, SWAPFREE/, SWAPTOTAL#, SWAPTOTAL/ and TMP# or TMP/. By default the unit is MB (Megabytes), where 1MB is 1<<20 bytes.
VOV-12409 Accelerator Plus, FlowTracer None Elastic taskers launched via vovwxd will detect and exit mote quickly when their designated bucket is empty or deleted. Accelerator Plus queues using Direct Drive will detect empty queues and stop launching taskers for those buckets more quickly. This functionality can be disabled by setting vovwxd.fastexit server parameter to 0. This is on by default.

Resolved Issues

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-13517 All None Fixed issue that prevented the Property Editor GUI utility in vovconsole from launching successfully.
VOV-13183 All None Fixed a potential memory leak when a client running a long-running query is unexpectedly terminated, causing vovserver to permanently mark a query as "in-use".
VOV-7887 All 21377 Clarified documentation of VOV_LIMIT_vmemoryuse.
VOV-13523 All None Fixed an issue that caused vovshow -queries to fail when trying to access a non-existent array element.
VOV-13568 All None Fixed an issue where comma list resource maps were not selectable in the Web UI.
VOV-13743 All None Corrected format of output for vtk_time_psp that was returning hh:mm format when the given date/time was on a different day/year. Now returns hh:mm only for current day, otherwise month abbreviation and day (Apr 14) for the same year, else Year month abbreviation (Dec 2020).
VOV-13706 All None The vovtasker binary was missing from 2021.1.0. As a workaround, in previous product versions where it may be missing in the installation, copy vovslave to vovtasker.
VOV-13610 All None Fixed issue with displaying working taskers in Altair Accelerator 2021.1.0
VOV-13351 All CS0173855 Fixed some cases where the Server Working Directory (SWD) contained slaveClass.table or taskerClass.table, and these configuration files were ignored by taskers/slaves. Scenarios that had been broken were:
  • slaves.tcl and slaveClass.table present in SWD
  • slaves.tcl and taskers.tcl and taskerClass.table present in SWD
  • taskers.tcl and taskerClass.table present in SWD
VOV-13439 All CS0175205, CS0187053 Code related to vovps has been modified to be more robust in handling of non-fatal errors emanating from vovps command and to be more inline with typical ps command output.
VOV-12897 All CS0140687, CS170776 On some network configurations, a warning about IPV6 could be issued when running an INTERACTIVE job that could not be filtered out by turning down the verbosity. This has been fixed. The -v switch to nc run on an interactive job will turn off the warning.
VOV-13014 All None With multi-platform product installs, the Accelerator documentation bookshelf link in the Web UI was nonfunctional. This only impacted customers who download and un-tar both common.tar and win64.tar with the intent of installing both linux64 and win64 into the same master installation directory.
VOV-13171 All CS0164654 The timeout duration for PR saves can now be controlled via a server configuration parameter.
VOV-13837 All None Fixed issue that caused some vtx-wrapper links to point to an incorrect absolute path.
VOV-13502 All None This fix provides for mitigation of a hang in the http(s) service. It reinstates the nginx service found in earlier releases. The use of the patch is required for production systems using the https service - typically Accelerator. The patch prevents the use of the REST v3 API and the new web based Dashboard, which is dependent on the REST v3 API. A subsequent release will address this shortcoming. The use of nginx should be seen as temporary and a subsequent release is expected to provide integrated https within vovserver. To start nginx, pass -webprovider nginx to ncmgr start, lmmgr start, etc. You should see vovnginxd start as one of the vov daemons. vovservermgr config will also show the webprovider setting as being either 'internal' or 'nginx' depending on how you have configured the system.
VOV-13416 All None Added configuration section to the sds.cfg file to allow inclusion kafka producer configuration properties such as those needed to enable ssl communication.
VOV-13162 Accelerator None The "Match Jobs to Handles" HTML topic now reflects the code colors that coincide with the software.
VOV-9353 Accelerator 23568 In the past, a stopped tasker and a newly started tasker were not aware of each other's NUMA usage, and so could assign CPU or Node affinity that overlaps. Taskers using NUMA on the same machine, with the same vovhost and queue name, will now share NUMA usage to avoid over allocating NUMA resources on the same machine.
VOV-7487 Accelerator 20455, CS0120837 Passing bash functions through snapprop is a fragile operation that only works when the following conditions hold:
  1. The function must have been explicitly exported, for example export -f f.
  2. The bash and sh shells must be the same on the submission and execution sides (this holds on CentOS 6-8 but not on Ubuntu).
  3. The bash function encoding must be the same on the submission and execution sides (this depends on the bash version, CentOS 6,7 have the same encoding, but CentOS 8 has different encoding).
Note: Bash encodes functions in two ways (subsequent to the 2014 shellshock vunerability):
  1. BASH_FUNC_<function-name>()=() (CentOS 6,7)
  2. BASH_FUNC_<function-name>%%=() (CentOS 8, MacOS, Ubuntu, albeit the latter does not satisfy 2. above)
VOV-7736 Accelerator 21176 Fixed building of resource maps from resources with OR and AND words in resource names.
VOV-13629 Accelerator CS0178114, CS0186671, CS0192772, CS0194045, CS0196466 Fixed an issue where a failed PTY connection for a job would cause subsequent jobs on the tasker to fail as long as the original job was still running, and in some cases, the tasker could become unresponsive.
VOV-13651 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue in node.cgi which resulted in the CPU Time displayed for job being multiplied by 1000.
VOV-13152 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0159375 Fixed spurious error message when receiving (RESMAP,CHANGE) events in some clients.
VOV-13293 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0169911 Added check for ADMIN privilege which blocks the regular user from stopping the job using NC command nc stop -allusers if the requesting user is not ADMIN.
VOV-13161 Accelerator CS0163181 Fixed issue where setting a project or site message in /cgi/messages.cgi would not result in a message being registered.
VOV-13324 Accelerator None Tasker based support has been added for the following vovselect fieldnames:

CHOSENTASKERID, LASTTASKERID, LASTTASKERNAME, TASKERGROUP, TASKERID, TASKERLIST, TASKERNAME, TASKERSLOTSSUSPENDABLE, TASKERSLOTSSUSPENDED, TASKERSLOTSUSED, TASKERSTATUS for jobs, TASKERID for clients, TASKERGROUP, TASKERHOST, TASKERNAME, TASKERSLOTSSUSPENDABLE, TASKERSLOTSSUSPENDED, TASKERSLOTSUSED, TASKERTYPE for slaves or taskers.

The same are available for use as symbolics such as @LASTTASKERID@ or @TASKERNAME@, etc.
VOV-13398 Accelerator None An error in the online help regarding vtk_server_config suddenshutdown <server-pid> has been addressed.
VOV-13388 Accelerator None Fixed issue that can cause vovserver to crash upon receipt of a REST request when thread.service.max and thread.service.enable.query are both greater than zero in the vovserver policy.
VOV-13363 Accelerator None Fixed ncupgrade abort by changing the vovserver stdout message to Vovmessage ( stderr )
VOV-13346 Accelerator CS0120637, CS0164333, CS0186238 Fixed an issue where a redirect in the nginx configuration would cause vovresourced to crash
VOV-13413 Accelerator CS0175672 Fixed issue where vwn incorrectly attempted to contact the server after the VOV_VW_PING interval.
VOV-13438 Accelerator None Removed vovproject enable command from ncupgrade so that it can read from stdin and can be used for testing automation.
VOV-13424 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0176272 The handling of the resource parameter to vtk_flexlm_monitor has been improved. If the a resource name is specified then this name is the actual resource name used (in a previous release it was always prepended by License:). If a resource name is not specified, it defaults to License:<feature>. This is consistent with vtk_flexlm_monitor_all behavior.
VOV-13465 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus CS0180449 Resolved issue when using vtk_tasker_define with -tsdport.
VOV-13458 Accelerator CS0180796 During jobclass initialization the VovUserError proc does not exit or generate any output.
VOV-13563 Accelerator Plus CS0186685 Fixed an issue which resulted in stalled WX buckets reporting a waitreason of License:xyz when really just waiting on HW in the base queue. Fixed an issue which prevented the setting of resmap.sw.types in the policy.tcl file.
VOV-13560 Accelerator Plus None The custom vnc_policy.tcl file for PBS integration is no longer required and should be removed upon upgrading to 2021.1.1. This file is located in $SWD/vnc_policy.tcl and was originally copied from $VOVDIR/../common/etc/config/vovwxd/vnc_policy_pbs.tcl.
VOV-13484 Accelerator Plus None Fixed an issue which could result in some slaves not being recognized as vovwxd slaves resulting in them not being counted toward max,slaves. Optimized scheduling for WX/PBS jobs by enabling the bucket shortcut and removing per slave resources.
VOV-13772 Accelerator Plus None The Accelerator Plus online help has been updated to reflect the addition of the Direct Drive functionality.
VOV-13562 Allocator CS0187051 Fixed a race-condition in Allocator that resulted in random crashes in complex configurations.
VOV-10426 FlowTracer 24499 NodeEditor has renamed 'In Queue' to 'Queue' and times shown are now based upon buckettime to give more accurate breakdown of the job's timeline.
VOV-12348 FlowTracer None A threshold of 4 is now applied before issuing warnings about WXLauncher is not running.
VOV-13419 FlowTracer CS0172898 Fixed vovconsole performance degradation for drawing the sets and switching between horizontal and vertical view.
VOV-13323 Monitor None Fixed issue that caused remote LM parser to fail and return no data.
VOV-13066 Monitor CS0151123 The registering of multiple hosts defined through env variable VOV_LICMON is now handled correctly. However its use should be minimized due to the additional overhead involved and consequential impact on job start up time.
VOV-13390 Monitor None Fixed an issue that prevented licenses provided by Altair license key files from being monitored.
VOV-13446 Monitor None Fixed rare issue that caused an "Unexpected return -90" message in the vovserver log when the top job of a bucket cannot be dispatched to a tasker at the time the dispatch function is called.
VOV-13440 Monitor None Fixed issue that prevented licensing detail tables from being displayed on the licensing administration web UI page on Windows.
VOV-13426 Monitor CS0154262 Some valid Accelerator and Monitor license key files with vovversion set for the early part of year 2021 were not working because of a bug in license keyfile validation code.
VOV-12980 Monitor CS0144723 Fixed ftlm_batch_report for checkouts that have not been moved yet to Altair Monitor database.

2021.1.0 Release Notes

New Features and Enhancements

The following new features and enhancements were introduced this software release:

Table 4.
Product Issue Number Case Number Description
All VOV-9454 23741 Most of the VOV Tcl files from the installation package now contain the proper Altair copyright statement and version number.
All VOV-12801   Introduce the new "tasker" lexicon for Accelerator product environment variables. Environment variable names containing old term "SLAVE" will get new names containing "TASKER" in the place of "SLAVE". The old environment variable name will be honored unless the new name is being used. This compatibility measure will ease the transition for administrators.
All VOV-12797   New Tcl VTK function names are added to move to the new "tasker" lexicon. Old VTK function names containing the string "slave" are deprecated, and new VTK function names containing the string "tasker" are added and should be transitioned to from this release forward.
All VOV-9297   Support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 has been added to the Altair Accelerator products.
All VOV-12111   Support for CentOS and RHEL 8 has been added to the Altair Accelerator products.
All VOV-13321   Support for Ubuntu 14.04 has been dropped.
All VOV-13306   This release discontinues support for the SLES 11 operating system.
All VOV-13127   All references to the term "slave" have been replaced with the new term "tasker" throughout the online help documentation.
Accelerator VOV-12708   A REST API guide and tutorial document is added to the Accelerator documentation bookshelf reader.
Accelerator VOV-12537   SlaveLists are deprecated and replaced with TaskerLists with the following additional functionality:
  • The Taskerlists now contain the tasker names instead of only NC-internal IDs. As a result, the taskerlist does not have te be recreated when a tasker is stopped and then restarted, as had been the case with slavelists in previous releases.
  • The TaskerLists definition will be stored in the PR so they will survive vovserver stop-and-restart sequences.
  • Added support for resource 'TaskerList:XXX' in nc run
  • SlaveList:XXX' resources will be automatically replaced by 'TaskerList:XXX' resources.
Accelerator VOV-12458   Implemented "Dialpad" or "Waffle" menu for mobile screens and at high zoom levels on the dashboard UI page.
Accelerator VOV-12743   Implemented Subsets table in Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-12747   An actions dropdown menu has been added, enabling the actions (delete, run with priority) to be performed on selected jobs. Added a search bar, allowing the user to filter the jobs by entering search strings.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-12150   The documentation shown by "ncmgr start -h" is expanded to explain some additional features that require an Accelerator queue to have the webport enabled. In the 2020.1.0 release, the following new features require the webport: 1) REST v3 API and 2) the new administrator dashboard UI page.
Accelerator VOV-12964   Fixed CSS issues in bulk actions drop down.
Accelerator VOV-12812   Enabled client activity logging for nc cmd commands.
Accelerator VOV-12744   Added a Details section for the selected set in the Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-12739   Added UI functionality in the Dashboard > Set Browser screen. Users can now perform actions like retrace, and delete on sets, and also filter the displayed list of sets by text string.
Accelerator VOV-12460   Added NC queue color to the dashboard user interface.
Accelerator VOV-12762   Implemented storybooks for the Table component user interface.
Accelerator VOV-9778 23068, 23767, 23914, 24923 Irrelevant alerts are no longer generated. Addressed some implementation issues with vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags. Note that calls to vtk_flexlm_exclude_tags are cumulative and override any tags added with vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all. The -noooq parameter for vtk_flexlm_monitor has no impact at present, please use vovresSetFlags instead. The -order parameter to vtk_flexlm_monitor and vtk_flexlm_monitor_all only orders any specified tags, it no longer adds tags (use -tags to add tags). The optional parameters vovResource, vovMap to vtk_flexlm_monitor are now handled correctly.
Accelerator VOV-12277   A new command option for nc run has been added called -dpinitialport N which allows the user to specify the starting port that partialTool will use to find an open port to communicate among the subtasks in the cohort. This will be reflected in a new job property named DP_INITIAL_PORT that can be observed being set on the job.
Accelerator VOV-12736   The React dashboard has now implemented a Sets List view.
Accelerator VOV-12742   Implemented Jobs table in Set Detailed View page.
Accelerator VOV-13292   Two new server configuration parameters have been added: http.workerthreads and http.proxytimeout. http.workerthreads specifies the number of worker threads that the new REST HTTP server will start when vovserver starts with a valid webport. http.proxytimeout enables you to specify the timeout in seconds, used when the main webserver forwards some requests, like CGI pages, to the older http server listening on the VOV port.
Accelerator VOV-11930 CS0120821 A new command line parameter was added for nc run for dp jobs called -nocohortwait. This instructs partialTool for each cohort task to finish when its subtask process has finished rather than wait for the primary job to complete (which is the default behavior). Passing -nochortwait to nc run sets a new property named DP_COHORTWAIT to 0. By default, this is set to 1 when -nocohortwait is not passed, and partialTool will behave like it always has.
Accelerator, FlowTracer, Monitor VOV-10198   Add support for Windows Server 2019.
Accelerator VOV-12947   Added breadcrumb navigation to the Sets page, through which the user can navigate to the hierarchical sets.
Accelerator VOV-12452   Add a sub-window for scheduler health monitoring and vital signs in the Accelerator admin dashboard web UI.
Accelerator VOV-12733   Support is added for Accelerator on ARM64 systems running Centos 7, Centos 8, or Amazon Linux 2. This support is for execution hosts and submit hosts only. The "armv8" hardware resource name is added for this architecture.
Accelerator Plus VOV-12295 CS0121114
  1. Fixed an issue where the NUMA_AFFINITY property on jobs always showed it as being bound to specific CPUs, even though it was bound to the entire NUMA node.
  2. Fixed an issue where WX vovtaskers were overriding the affinity set by the NC vovtasker, causing WX jobs to be bound to only a subset of the available CPUs.
FlowTracer VOV-12556   Add support for FlowTracer on Windows.
Hero VOV-12891   Added a -P <NAME=VALUE> parameter to the hero submit command (similar to the NC -P parameter).
Hero VOV-12932   Added the -modules, -stagein, -stageout parameters to the hero -zebu submit command. The DeclareEmulator specification now includes the following parameters: -type (for future use), -environment, z-ebu_system_dir, -zebu_root. The commands specified in the -stagein, -stageout parameters depend on the resources Limit:zebu_stagein_load, Limit:zebu_stageout_load.
Monitor VOV-5671   The vtk_feature_add_or_create API now expects an additional parameter for the associated ISV string. See the documentation for the new syntax. The vtk_featureuser_* APIs have had their names changed to vtk_checkout_*. The old vtk_featureuser_* names are still supported but vtk_checkout_* will be the official documented names.
Accelerator VOV-6572   This should be fixed as a side effect of implementing the mutator API. See release notes for VOV-8899.
All VOV-9298   Support for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 is added.
All VOV-13364   Starting with the 2021.1.0 release, the Accelerator Products images come with digitally signed certificates that can be used to reliably confirm authenticity of the installation media images.

Resolved Issues

The following issues were resolved in this release.

Table 5.
Product Issue Number Case Number Description
All VOV-13252   Web server improvements (when the web port is configured as non-zero):
  1. Added the following headers to all HTTP responses:
    • Strict-Transport-Security
    • X-Frame-Options
    • X-Xss-Protection
    • X-Content-Type-Options
    • X-Content-Security-Policy
    • Content-Security-Policy
  2. Added support for web ports higher than 32000.
All VOV-13181   Some stability improvements were made in the Webserver code to avoid potential crashes of vovserver.
All VOV-12989 CS0145649 Fixed an issue where stopping more than 1 vovtasker by name (vovtaskermgr stop <tasker1> <tasker2>...) was renaming only the last named tasker to <taskername>_stopped_<timestamp>.
All VOV-9560 23740 Fixed an issue with vovnotifyd using only the first RAM value for jobs with multiple RAM requests (e.g.: -r+ RAM/100 -r+ RAM/200) to determine if the job is exceeding requested RAM usage (health check of requested RAM).
Accelerator VOV-11388 25153 Fixed an issue with the vovserver failing to start when epoll is enabled (set config(useepoll) 1) in policy.tcl.
All VOV-12582   The vovtaskermgr start command will now only utilize the configured rshcmd (one of: inetd/rsh/ssh/vovtsd) for starting remote taskers. Prior to this change, the inetd method was always attempted, and the vovtsd method would be attempted if the configured vovtsd port was non-zero.
All VOV-12512   All references to PBS Works support have been updated to direct the user to the new Altair One website.
All VOV-6287 20738 Fixed the issue in the error message "too many elements in array" where the max array was not getting updated as per the config(maxJobArray).
All VOV-13247   Network security testing port scans had in certain cases caused vovserver to hang up in an infinite loop.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus, Monitor VOV-13009 CS0133888 In the help information displayed by nc cmd vovdaemonmgr -h, a note was added indicating that the -f (force) option applies only to the start subcommand, and only when a daemon list is specified.
Accelerator VOV-12418 CS0121215 By default, interactive jobs will also write to a logfile just like normal jobs do. You can also specify the log file with the -l parameter to nc run like normal jobs. If you do not want an interactive job to write to the log file, use -nolog as a parameter to nc run
Accelerator VOV-12135   The axis labels in the jobs histogram in the dashboard UI page showed repeated "1" labels with a small number of running or queueed jobs.
Accelerator VOV-13000 CS0128274 Fixed an issue where incrementing grabbed resources was not incrementing the count of used resources in some cases.
Accelerator VOV-13039 CS0146315 The network data sent as a result of nc info was made more compact, which will make running the command more efficient.
Accelerator VOV-13113   Fixed CSS issues in Set Browser page.
Accelerator VOV-13026 CS0149221 Handle window/weight inheritance for new FairShare groups that are being created during job submission. The window will be inherited from the parent. Both the window and weight will be inherited from a sibling group named "default".
Accelerator VOV-12714   Fixed the following issues with job container support:
  1. The VOV_CONTAINER_<resource> (where <resource> is CORES, RAM, or TMP) environment variable was not being set in the hook environments for containers that were configured to use the job's resource specification as container limits.
  2. The VOV_CONTAINER_JOB_RUNDIR environment variable was not being set in the hook environments if the job's run directory had been configured as an equivalence, as would be the case for jobs submitted from within the user's home directory.
Accelerator VOV-13108   As per the new API response, changes made to the footer version text.
Accelerator VOV-13272   Increased virtual memory limit for nc run.
Accelerator, FlowTracer VOV-12908   The Accelerator new dashboard UI for administrators, when accessed, will increase the vovserver memory "Size" metric printed by the vsi command. The large reported memory size is virtual memory address space size, with only modest associated increase in actual memory usage. The number of worker threads used by the web server can be controlled with config(http.workerthreads) N in policy.tcl. Changing this value will require a vovserver restart, because it can only be set once before the multithreaded webserver is initialized. Also, a timeout value for when the multi-threaded webserver has to delegate some requests, such as CGI pages, to the old vovserver web server, can be configured by setting config(http.proxytimeout). This value can be changed at any time.
Accelerator VOV-12977 CS0143428 Fixed an issue with interactive jobs (nc run -I) failing with the error message "Job has problems with PTY. Bad pipes".
Accelerator VOV-12811 CS0129987 vtk_resourcemap_set now requires that the user either own the resource, or the user have ADMIN security rights for it to take effect.
Accelerator VOV-10921 24781, 24803 To better clarify jobs that have been queued due to reserved taskers, additional information has been added to the output of the nc why command. Under the "Per-slave/per-tasker analysis" section, a count of taskers that would have been compatible but are reserved will be shown as: 'n is currently reserved by others'
Accelerator VOV-5980 21105 The nc modify command has been modified to exit with a status of 1 if any part of the modification request fails.
Accelerator VOV-12892   With certain types of product install methods, the Accelerator documentation bookshelf link in the Web UI had not been functional. This only impacted customers who download and un-tar both common.tar and win64.tar with the intent of installing both linux64 and win64 into the same master installation directory. The workaround was to un-tar and install win64 first, then go back and un-tar common.tar and linux64.tar, and then install linux64 only. If you had an existing installation the workaround was to un-tar common.tar and reinstall linux64 only.
Accelerator VOV-12547   Fixed an issue with the -Il option for interactive jobs that prevented the user from typing in the terminal window and interacting with the job.
Accelerator VOV-11452   Added -orphanreservations option to the vovforget command for forgetting the reservations not attached to any tasker. Behaviour is modified to allow overlapping reservation in the system, but it will never be in effect unless the dominant reservation is deleted. Fixed an issue where the tasker reservation gets duplicated after server restart. Also, changed the tasker instance reservation (created using vtk_tasker_define (-reserve option) or by passing the -e option to vovtasker) to be non-persistent by default. No change in behavior for tasker reservations created using vtk_reservation_create.
Accelerator VOV-11662 29869 Fixed "no such variable 'killTimePP'" alerts when health checks are enabled for stuck jobs with -stuckKillTime.
Accelerator VOV-9254 23430 Fixed issue that prevented child FairShare groups from being displayed when viewing the top-level group via vovfsgroup show.
Accelerator VOV-11261   Addressed issue where delays were encountered due to vovserver not being immediately notified of an update.
Accelerator VOV-7490 20070, 24363 Fixed an issue leading to "URGENT vovnotifyd Cannot send mail. can't read "code": no such variable" alerts. Reduced the severity to WARN, in case of failures to send mail. Also, added an alert if the list of recipients for notification emails is empty.
Accelerator VOV-12464 CS0122942 Requests for CGROUP:RAM with more than 1 RAM specification will now limit RAM usage to the total amount requested by all RAM specifications rather than the last one.  For example the command: nc run -r CGROUP:RAM RAM/60 RAM/40 -- sleep 0 will limit ram usage to 100 megabytes rather than 40.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13030 CS0149277 Fixed an issue with Ctrl-C not working as expected with interactive jobs (nc run -I/-Il/-Ir).
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus, FlowTracer VOV-4998 CS0143832 For all products, strict job name checking has been enabled and invalid job name characters will cause an error. For Accelerator and Accelerator Plus, this can be overridden by putting the following in $VOVDIR/local/vncrun.config.tcl 
set ::jobname_lexicon legacy
or 
set ::jobname_lexicon replace
Legacy will use the more lax job naming rules from earlier releases. Replace will identify invalid characters in the job name, replace them with "_", and issue a warning to the console An issue with vsm being enabled to handle some invalid job name characters was addressed.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13051 CS0121039 Fixed an issue with interactive jobs (nc run -I) failing with error messages similar to "Error=98: Address already in use [vovttyserver2:244]" and "FATAL ERROR: Cannot open PTY port (with remote signal handling): Cannot open pty server sockets [vncrun.tcl:2257]". This is accompanied by job errors similar to "Cannot connect to PTY server on submission host lava1 13316 Z@:x=XGa56cT_Hd6 from lava5".
Accelerator VOV-12519   For consistency across CLI and web UI, the default values for the following VovPremptRule options have changed in some cases from previous versions.
  • The option -resumedelay default is now 5 seconds previously the CLI default was 10 seconds.
  • The default pool name is now mainpool, previously the web UI default was MainPool.
  • The default for -mqthresh is now 0.1=10%, before the web UI default was 0.01.
  • The -killage option default is now 60, previous version of the web UI had a default of 0.
  • For -skipresumedjob option default is 120, previous versions of the web UI had a default of 0.
  • For -preemptslavenum new default will always be 1, some variants of CLI had a default value of 2 previously.
Accelerator VOV-10558 23924 Empty job class sets are not deleted, thereby preserving all properties for future submissions.
Accelerator VOV-12807   When you hover the mouse over the job graph line in the dashboard UI window, a small pop-up displays the Y unit, the Y number, and a time. The Y number is actually an average over a surrounding time window, and not an instantaneous value as implied by the information shown.
Accelerator VOV-13169   When vovserver was configured with webport and failover was configured, it was found that vovserver could lose access to the webport and get restarted with the webport disabled. This has been fixed. Also, if Accelerator was configured to use License Monitor, it was observed that failover could leave an extra copy of the voveventmon process launched by vovresourced running every time vovserver crashes and restarted. vovresourced has been modified to properly shut down voveventmon in the case where vovserver has crashed.
Accelerator VOV-13036   Fixed a server crash caused by memory corruption when running queries from a 2016.09 client.
Allocator VOV-10997 CS0156459 Suppressed the log, "Could not add FTResJob...", as it is not impacting the functionality.
Allocator VOV-12724 CS0130000 Fixed issues with the allocation of resource groups in Allocator. Prior implementations based the allocation on demand for the component resources only. The new implementation bases the allocation on demand for the resource group and all of its component resources.
Allocator VOV-11883 CS0120726 Fixed issue when the same feature serviced by different daemons with different tags which makes -ExcludeTagRx ignored.
Allocator VOV-11894 CS0120781 Fixed CSV export of the Home > Overview and Home > Resources > Matches tabular reports.
Allocator VOV-11224 24981 Fixed an issue with Allocator showing incorrect "Distributable" values when 'SetReserverForUser' is used with * (all users).
Allocator VOV-13025 CS0145466 Added a config key MQ(pjProbeKillTimeout) for the maximum time that the vovlad daemon should wait for existing probes to be killed at startup.
FlowTracer VOV-7956 21595 Addressed issue that prevented alert text from being displayed in the vovconsole alerts window.
FlowTracer VOV-12960 CS0143848 Fixed issue with keyword substitution for array job submissions that caused arbitrary matches to the array reference job's ID and IDINT values to be substituted with the ID and IDINT values from the individual array jobs in the job metadata. For example, an array job submission of "echo 000001070" where the reference job was coincidentally job 1070 would result in the command being changed in each individual array job to reflect its own ID, such as "echo 000001072" for job 1, "echo 000001074" for job 2, and so on.
FlowTracer VOV-12815 CS0137268 Evaluation of resources when used with an indirect tasker (taskerVNC) now applies the jobclass followed by the resource list which is the opposite of what was done previously.
FlowTracer VOV-12203 CS0120999 Re-evaluation of a job class to compute the union of resources when used with an indirect tasker(taskerVNC) is no longer done. This is typically relevant for FlowTracer integration with either Accelerator (NC) or Accelerator Plus (WX). To restore the old behavior, please contact Altair support.
FlowTracer VOV-12901   Fixed an issue where the user may see PIPELOG related errors in the console on Windows, when running a FlowTracer job directly from the command line, such as : vov cmd.exe /c echo "Hello"
FlowTracer VOV-12918 CS0142609 Improved the behavior of the Taskers > NC Interface: vovwxd vovconsole menu option, which configures and starts the vovwxd daemon. The daemon will be configured to use the default queue name (vnc) unless the NC_QUEUE environment variable is present.
FlowTracer VOV-10189   Schedule priority and execution priority are now saved in the persistent representation.
FlowTracer VOV-12813 CS0137660 systemjob state is now saved in the representation so that it's persistent across FlowTracer restarts.
Hero VOV-12931   Wrapper daemon now runs on the emulator vovtasker associated with the emulator. Previously it ran from wherever the autostart command was executed. Fixed an issue that prevented the command hero -zebu stop_all_wrappers from working correctly in some instances.
Monitor VOV-9774 24058, CS0121121 Fixed problem parsing MathLM licenses when one of HH MM SS time values starts with 08 and 09.
Monitor VOV-12253 CS0120851 Fixed MathLM parser for features with "Sub" and space prefix.
Monitor VOV-12634 CS0126701 Fixed Altair Monitor GUI to correctly show expiration date if one of the licenses expired.
Monitor VOV-12324 CS0121132, 21139 The output format for more recent versions of Sentinel RMS has changed. The new format caused ftlm_parse_sentinel to incorrectly calculate capacity. It now recognizes the new format and only counts instances of capacity appearing inside a feature block. Support for older formats has been retained.
Monitor VOV-9100 23225 Fixed LM report plotting with "Breakdown By Feature" option.

2021.1.0-rs1 Patch Release Notes

The following new features and resolved issues were introduced this software release:

Product Issue Number Case Number Description
Accelerator VOV-13399   Added Rapid Scaling - a feature that provides high-throughput, cost-conscious scheduling in the cloud.
Accelerator VOV-13470   The Rapid Scaling PDF has been updated to reflect the changes relative to the 2021.1.0-rs1 patch.

2021.1.0-p1 Patch 1 Release Notes

New Features

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-13502 All None This fix provides for mitigation of a hang in the http(s) service. It reinstates the nginx service found in earlier releases. The use of the patch is required for production systems using the https service - typically Accelerator. The patch prevents the use of the REST v3 API, a subsequent release will address this shortcoming. The use of nginx should be seen as temporary and a subsequent release is expected to provide integrated https within vovserver. To start nginx, pass '-webprovider nginx' to ncmgr start, lmmgr start, etc. You should see vovnginxd start as one of the vov daemons. 'vovservermgr config' will also show the webprovider setting as being either 'internal' or 'nginx' depending on how you have configured the system.
1 On Windows, only the following are supported: FlowTracer, Monitor, and Accelerator (taskers only).