When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given
person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
FlowTracer is derived from the system "VOV" originally developed at UC-Berkeley. The word "VOV" is not an acronym, but can be
thought of as a contraction of the word "evolve".
FlowTracer uses a weight-driven placement (WDP) algorithm to place nodes close to their dependencies and minimize overlapping
edges. A higher weight is assigned to nodes with low fanout, which allows nodes with single dependency relationships
to stack perfectly. A lower weight is assigned to high fanout dependencies.
Altair Accelerator includes a subsystem for managing computing resources. This allows the design team to factor in various constraints
regarding hardware and software resources, as well as site policy constraints.
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing
security and access rules for the system.
The top of the console is the graphical taskers LED monitor. It
consists of a grid of sunken rectangles, each representing a tasker host. The color of the rectangle indicates the Tasker Status. In configurations with lots of taskers, each rectangle gets small, reduced to almost like a status
LED on a phone. Figure 1.
Right-clicking on rectangle activates a pop-up menu to control the taskers and the job currently being executed by the taskers.
The taskers LED monitor has limited space, so it can only show a
few taskers. If there are more taskers than
can fit in the space of the LED, they get automatically grouped together by their
status. When grouped like this, a single LED is shown for each group of taskers with similar status. The number in the label indicates how
many taskers are in that group.
You can choose to group taskers by a different criteria by
selecting the criteria in the dropdown next to the LEDs. Possible grouping criteria
are: Arch, Status, and Group. Alternately, you can choose to see all taskers which will then display an LED for each tasker without any grouping.
Note: When displaying all taskers, there may not be enough space to display all taskers. To see all the taskers, you can
display the floating taskers monitor by choosing the Console > Floating Taskerlists Monitor menu item.