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Design & Motivation

First we will describe how jarvis-cd is organized and the files that it creates.

Jarvis Config​

The Jarvis configuration file is stored under ${JARVIS_ROOT}/config/jarvis_config.yaml. It stores the ${CONFIG_DIR}, ${PRIVATE_DIR}, and ${SHARED_DIR} variables described in the Home page. Additionally, it stores the currently-active hostfile and the set of repos to search for pkgs. This file essentially determines where Jarvis will store metadata for pipelines.

The resource graph for the current machine is stored under ${JARVIS_ROOT}/config/resource_graph.yaml. The resource graph stores information about the machine state, including hardware and networks.

Pkgs​

Jarvis-cd deploys complex applications. In Jarvis, we consider applications "pkgs". Pkgs can be connected to form a pipeline, which is a series of applications to deploy all at once.

Jarvis has three general pkg types:

  1. Service: a program which runs forever, until forcibly stopped.
  2. Application: a program which runs to a definite completion. For example, run IOR over OrangeFS, BeeGFS, and Hermes.
  3. Interceptor: Used to intercept code for a benchmark or storage system.

Pipelines​

Jarvis-cd provides a CLI to create pipelines. A pipeline specifies an ordered set of configured pkgs to execute. An example of a jarvis pipeline would be as follows:

example-pipeline

Service Pkgs​

Service pkgs represent long-running applications. An example would be a storage system.

Storage systems have complex configurations:

  1. What pkgs do metadata servers go on?
  2. What pkgs do storage server go on?
  3. What storage devices do we use?
  4. What interface should the storage device expose? Filesystem? Block device?
  5. What networking protocol do we use?
  6. How many threads to use?
  7. The list goes on and on.

To make matters worse, each storage system has different ways to represent this information. Each machine has different paths, different network cards, different IPs, etc. How do we simplify the deployment of these complex systems?

At the end of the day, there's no way to get around having a configuration file. For each storage system, we store configuration files. These files are stored in the ${PRIVATE_DIR} and ${SHARED_DIR} directories stored in the jarvis configuration.

jarvis ppl create ofs-global
jarvis ppl append orangefs
jarvis ppl start &
jarvis ppl stop

Application Pkgs​

Applications can include:

  • benchmarks
  • simulation codes
jarvis ppl create my-benchmark
jarvis cd my-benchmark
jarvis ppl append orangefs
jarvis ppl append hermes
jarvis ppl append ior

Interceptor Pkgs​

A library can be used to intercept or monitor some functionality of an application. For example, a library may include

jarvis ppl create my-app
jarvis cd my-app
jarvis ppl append orangefs \
  client_path=${HOME}/llogan/pfs
jarvis ppl append hermes
jarvis ppl append monitor
jarvis ppl append qmcpack
jarvis ppl run

Pipeline Metadata​

When creating a pipeline, metadata for the pipeline will be created under the ${CONFIG_DIR} from the jarvis config.

The metadata for the currently-focused pipeline.

jarvis create my-pipeline
ls `jarvis path`

This will print all folders and files relevant to my-pipeline.

When adding pkgs to the pipeline, sub-folders will be created for each individual pkg. For example, the following will print all files used by the hermes pkg.

jarvis append hermes
ls `jarvis path`/hermes