code.edbaskerville.com

Spurred by an increasing devotion to free information and free culture and because I don’t want to write an automatic license-generation engine, I’m releasing XgridLite under the GNU GPL. Code available via WebSVN or just via:

svn co http://code.edbaskerville.com/svn/xgridlite

I silently released XgridDRMAA 0.1 the other day; today I’m releasing XgridDRMAA 0.1.1 and announcing it to the appropriate mailing lists.

You can download it here:

http://code.edbaskerville.com/xgrid_drmaa/XgridDRMAA.dmg

I have now included simple example code in all three supported languages (C, Objective-C, Java). For people working in Mac-only environments, I highly recommend the Objective-C interface. If you want your code to work with, e.g., Sun Grid Engine as well, the Java interface is convenient. If you’re attached to C, go ahead, but the API is a little cumbersome. All three languages use the Objective-C implementation at their core. (In the case of Java, there are actually two levels of wrapping: Java wraps C; C wraps Objective-C; this is so I could re-use Sun’s Java bindings for the Grid Engine.)

The code doesn’t take too much explanation, but here’s a basic outline of what it does:

1. Obtain an object representing a DRMAA session (Objective-C and Java only).
2. Open the session.
3. Create a job template object describing various aspects of the job: in this case, it simply echoes a single number and writes stdout to the user’s desktop on the client machine.
4. Run a “bulk job”—that is, a job with a parameterized index—with an index running from 1 to 5. The corresponding sub-job simply echoes the parameterized index.
5. “Synchronize” all five jobs—wait for them all to complete.
6. Clean up memory (C and Java only).
7. Close the session and exit.

Development work will be on hold for the next few weeks as I work on GridSweeper and travel around Europe, but please send along feedback for when I return to it in early September! For bug reports, please use the bug database.

I’m pleased to announce the first development release of XgridDRMAA. This version should be useful enough to do basic job submission and monitoring tasks, but will probably have some problems to work out. Due partially to limitations in Xgrid and partially to time, some features are still missing (see the readme).

Over the next few days (between Paris gigs with The April Fishes) I’ll upload some tutorials on how to actually use the framework. For now, you can consult the DRMAA website for general information.

You can download the file here:

http://code.edbaskerville.com/xgrid_drmaa/XgridDRMAA.dmg

I just checked my Google Summer of Code status page for the four hundred millionth time in the last few weeks. Lo and behold: Application accepted!

More details to come. Let the coding begin!

Every software project should have a bug-tracking system, so I decided to set up a public one on this site. I’ve been using Bugzilla on my local machine in the past, but its default presentation is really ugly, so I decided to look for something that required less configuration. After trying to set up Trac and eventually giving up for a number of reasons, I decided to just go with Mantis, a very simple, straightforward, LAMP solution. It’s not as sexy as Trac, but it should do everything I need.

I also added links to the sidebar for Mantis and for WebSVN.

You can now browse the repositories for the two available projects (EcoGillespie and LilyPad) using WebSVN:

• EcoGillespie
• LilyPad

Welcome to code.edbaskerville.com, where I’m going to keep a record of my software development efforts. The site will certainly be useful for me, since I’ll have a permanent (?) record of my progress on software projects, notes, etc., etc. I hope it will also be useful for people out there using the software: here they can give me ideas, suggestions criticisms, etc. Also, I’m going to be making a few projects open source, so this will be a home for those efforts as well.

I’m building this site using WordPress. Until I have some time to experiment with formatting, I’m just going to go with the default theme, which looks just fine.