Some BLAHP Notes

BLAHP is a plugin to Condor-G that enables Condor to submit jobs directly to schedulers like PBS/Torque. It is a variation of the GAHP scheduler that Condor-G uses to submit Globus jobs. Globus in turn provides the appropriate job manager for interacting with local scheduler. BLAHP (hopefully) will allow us to skip this step.

BLAHP is avaialble from the EGEE; see https://twiki.cnaf.infn.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/EgeeJra1It/BLAH_guide for an overview. There is an obsolete version of this in the Condor release, but we must override.

We are interested in this because Condor-G and Birdbath provide a Web service programming interface for managing jobs. See other notes on this blog and at http://sangpall.blogspot.com/. We'd like to use this service for accessing machines that don't run Globus GRAM.

Basic steps for getting this going are the following. All steps are done on the same server.

1. Install Condor and optionally Globus.
   
2. Get the latest Condor C++ Classads, configure, make, make install
   
3. Check out BLAHP from CVS, configure, make, make install
   
4. Get Torque if you don't have a scheduler installed, configure, make, make install.

Notes are courtesy of Francesco Prelz, with some corrections from Yu Marie Ma. I'm building this on RHEL4.

Install Classads

• Make an installation directory. I'll call this BLAHP.
  
• wget ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/c++/classads-0.9.9.tar.gz
• Unpack and cd.
  
• ./configure --prefix $HOME/BLAHP/classads/ --enable-namespace --lib-name classad
• make; make install

The trick is the configure step. You must enable the classad namespace (at least on RHEL4) for BLAHP to install (divined by Marie).

Install BLAHP
I also do these steps from the $HOME/BLAHP directory.

• cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@glite.cvs.cern.ch:/cvs/jra1mw co org.glite
• cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@glite.cvs.cern.ch:/cvs/jra1mw co -r glite-ce-blahp_R_1_11_1_0 org.glite.ce.blahp
  
• cd $HOME/BLAHP/org.glite.ce.blahp/
  
• ./configure --with-classads-prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/classads/ --with-globus-prefix=$HOME/globus/ --prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/blahp

Install Torque

This assumes you don't have this already installed. The steps below will work for a non-root build.

• cd $HOME/BLAHP
• ./configure --prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/torque --with-server-home=$HOME/BLAHP/torque
• make; make install

Configure BLAHP
We now need to configure BLAHP to work with our local Condor and Torque installations.