= Remote job submission =

A group from Universitat Pompeu Fabra
has developed a system for remote job submission and monitoring.
This system allows scientists to submit jobs (or groups of jobs)
from a convenient command-line interface.

The system (Perl-based) is in boinc/rboinc/.

'''Warning: this system has been used only by its developers.
It will take some work to get it working on other projects.'''

Powerpoint slides describing the system are
[http://boinc.berkeley.edu/rboinc.pdf here].

== Notes ==

The software should be fairly self-explanatory, but installation may be tricky. Here's a general overview

    * boinc_retrieve_server, boinc_submit_server run as cgi. The former, actually, also handles all administrative requests (stop, purge). 
    * boinc_retrieve, boinc_submit, are the client components (ditto as above for admin requests)
    * Exchange of files between client and server is done through WEBDAV http extensions (a scratch area needs be setup for this)

    * Wus naming is important and enforced like this: NNN-UUU_GGG-XX-YY-RNDzzzz where
          * NN is the name of the workunit (sub-group)
          * UU is the submitter id
          * GGG is the group
          * XX is the current step in the chain
          * YY is the total n. of steps
          * zzzz is a random number (not needed,actually)
    * WUs are kept in a "workflow_directory",  a subdir of the project dir,  as per slide 22 of the Powerpoint.
    * Inside each dir a "process" bash file is created, which is executed by the assimilator with the name of the assimilated WU as its argument. It will create_work the next step for execution.
    * The main reason for using perl is that  I preferred to use the XML::Simple module for (un-) xml-ing data structures over the network - it was useful for adding features on the fly keeping backwards compatibility
    * I implemented basic functions for authentication, but this is not finished yet
    * file storage is optimized through hardlinking and pooling. Network transfers are not (but they could be)