2021.1.1 Release Notes

New Features

Products Internal Number Case Number Description
Accelerator VOV-13210 None Added functionality to perform actions on sets in the Set Browser page.
Accelerator VOV-12810 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.
Accelerator VOV-12780 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.
Accelerator Plus, FlowTracer VOV-12409 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

Products Internal Number Case Number Description
All VOV-13517 None Fixed issue that prevented the Property Editor GUI utility in vovconsole from launching successfully.
All VOV-13183 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".
All VOV-7887 21377 Clarified documentation of VOV_LIMIT_vmemoryuse.
All VOV-13523 None Fixed an issue that caused vovshow -queries to fail when trying to access a non-existent array element.
All VOV-13568 None Fixed an issue where comma list resource maps were not selectable in the Web UI.
All VOV-13743 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).
All VOV-13706 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.
All VOV-13610 None Fixed issue with displaying working taskers in Altair Accelerator 2021.1.0
All VOV-13351 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
All VOV-13439 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.
All VOV-12897 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.
All VOV-13014 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.
All VOV-13171 CS0164654 The timeout duration for PR saves can now be controlled via a server configuration parameter.
All VOV-13837 None Fixed issue that caused some vtx-wrapper links to point to an incorrect absolute path.
All VOV-13502 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.
All VOV-13416 None Added configuration section to the sds.cfg file to allow inclusion kafka producer configuration properties such as those needed to enable ssl communication.
Accelerator VOV-13162 None The "Match Jobs to Handles" HTML topic now reflects the code colors that coincide with the software.
Accelerator VOV-9353 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.
Accelerator VOV-7487 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)
Accelerator VOV-7736 21176 Fixed building of resource maps from resources with OR and AND words in resource names.
Accelerator VOV-13629 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.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13651 None Fixed issue in node.cgi which resulted in the CPU Time displayed for job being multiplied by 1000.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13152 CS0159375 Fixed spurious error message when receiving (RESMAP,CHANGE) events in some clients.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13293 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.
Accelerator VOV-13161 CS0163181 Fixed issue where setting a project or site message in /cgi/messages.cgi would not result in a message being registered.
Accelerator VOV-13324 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.
Accelerator VOV-13398 None An error in the online help regarding vtk_server_config suddenshutdown <server-pid> has been addressed.
Accelerator VOV-13388 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.
Accelerator VOV-13363 None Fixed ncupgrade abort by changing the vovserver stdout message to Vovmessage ( stderr )
Accelerator VOV-13346 CS0120637, CS0164333, CS0186238 Fixed an issue where a redirect in the nginx configuration would cause vovresourced to crash
Accelerator VOV-13413 CS0175672 Fixed issue where vwn incorrectly attempted to contact the server after the VOV_VW_PING interval.
Accelerator VOV-13438 None Removed vovproject enable command from ncupgrade so that it can read from stdin and can be used for testing automation.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13424 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.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13465 CS0180449 Resolved issue when using vtk_tasker_define with -tsdport.
Accelerator VOV-13458 CS0180796 During jobclass initialization the VovUserError proc does not exit or generate any output.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13563 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13560 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13484 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13772 None The Accelerator Plus online help has been updated to reflect the addition of the Direct Drive functionality.
Allocator VOV-13562 CS0187051 Fixed a race-condition in Allocator that resulted in random crashes in complex configurations.
FlowTracer VOV-10426 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.
FlowTracer VOV-12348 None A threshold of 4 is now applied before issuing warnings about WXLauncher is not running.
FlowTracer VOV-13419 CS0172898 Fixed vovconsole performance degradation for drawing the sets and switching between horizontal and vertical view.
Monitor VOV-13323 None Fixed issue that caused remote LM parser to fail and return no data.
Monitor VOV-13066 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.
Monitor VOV-13390 None Fixed an issue that prevented licenses provided by Altair license key files from being monitored.
Monitor VOV-13446 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.
Monitor VOV-13440 None Fixed issue that prevented licensing detail tables from being displayed on the licensing administration web UI page on Windows.
Monitor VOV-13426 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.
Monitor VOV-12980 CS0144723 Fixed ftlm_batch_report for checkouts that have not been moved yet to Altair Monitor database.