Software update: Condor 7.5.0

The Condor Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has released a new development version of their workload management system Condor. The version number has arrived at 7.5.0 and the package is under the Apache 2.0 License issued. Condor focuses on the management of compute-intensive tasks and can distribute them over several connected nodes. The user sends his task to Condor, after which it handles the process based on set policies and the availability of the connected resources, and finally sends the results back to the user. Condor can, for example, control a dedicated Beowulf cluster, but standard desktops that are normally used for users can also be used when they have nothing to do for a while. The announcement, along with the list of changes to this release, is as follows:

Condor 7.5.0 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 7.5.0. This is a development release of Condor. The main new feature is the ability to have Condor daemons share a single network port for incoming connections. This feature is available in UNIX only in this release. All bug fixes from 7.4.1 are included in 7.5.0.

New Features:

• Added the new daemon condor_shared_port for Unix platforms (except for HPUX). It allows Condor daemons to share a single network port. This makes opening access to Condor through a firewall easier and safer. It also increases the scalability of a submit node by decreasing port usage. See section 3.3.36 for more information.
• Improved CCB’s handling of rude NAT/firewalls that silently drop TCP connections.
• Simplified the publication of daemon addresses. PublicNetworkIpAddr and PrivateNetworkIpAddr have been removed. MyAddress contains both public and private addresses. For now, IpAddr contains the same information. In a future release, the latter may be removed.
• Changes to TCP_FORWARDING_HOST, PRIVATE_NETWORK_ADDRESS, and PRIVATE_NETWORK_NAME can now be made without requiring a full restart. It may take up to one condor_collector update interval for the changes to become visible.
• Network compatibility with Condor prior to 6.3.3 is no longer supported unless SEC_CLIENT_NEGOTIATION is set to NEVER. This change removes the risk of communication errors causing performance problems resulting from automatic fall-back to the old protocol.
• For efficiency, authentication between the condor_shadow and condor_schedd daemons is now able to be cached and reused in more cases. Previously, authentication for updating job information was only cached if read access was configured to require authentication.
• condor_config_val will now report the default value for configuration macros that are not set in the configuration files.
• The condor_gridmanager now uses a single status call to obtain the status of all CREAM grid universe jobs from the remote server.
• The condor_gridmanager will now retry CREAM commands that time out.
• Forwarding a renewed proxy for CREAM grid universe jobs to the remote server is now much more efficient.

Configuration Variable and ClassAd Attribute Additions and Changes:

• Removed the configuration variable COLLECTOR_SOCKET_CACHE_SIZE. Configuration of this parameter used to be mandatory to enable TCP updates to the condor_collector. Now no special configuration of the condor_collector is required to allow TCP updates, but it is important to ensure that there are sufficient file descriptors for efficient operation. See section 3.7.5 for more information.
• The new configuration variable USE_SHARED_PORT is a boolean value that specifies whether a Condor process should rely on the condor_shared_port daemon for receiving incoming connections. Write access to DAEMON_SOCKET_DIR is required for this to take effect. The default is False. If set to True, SHARED_PORT should be added to DAEMON_LIST. See section 3.3.36 for more information.
• Added the new configuration variable CCB_HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL. It is the maximum number of seconds of silence on a daemon’s connection to the CCB server after which it will ping the server to verify that the connection still works. The default value is 1200 (20 minutes). This feature serves to both speed up detection of dead connections and to generate a guaranteed minimum frequency of activity to attempt to prevent the connection from being dropped.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed problem with a ClassAd debug function, so it now properly emits debug information for ClassAd IfThenElse clauses.