perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

All,

Today marks the release of perfSONAR 4.0rc3, which should mean that soon we will have a final release of perfSONAR 4.0 available. When we do the final release, our plan is to make it available as an auto-update. The auto-update process we have in place will preserve all your existing data and measurements. It will also still allow you to test with people running versions of the code before 4.0 and vice versa. Our goal is that for most of you this should be a seamless transition in spite of the large changes “under-the-hood". 

One area we want to highlight though is that hardware requirements have shifted slightly in this release, especially pertaining to CPU, so for some disabling auto-updates of the perfSONAR packages may be the best course of action. We recommend you keep auto-updates of any non-perfSONAR packages enabled so you can still get important security updates. See http://docs.perfsonar.net/release_candidates/4.0rc3/manage_update.html#disabling-automatic-updates-for-perfsonar-packages for instructions on how to diable perfSONAR auto-updates. Our recommendations for deciding how to approach auto-updates are as follows:

 

- If you have a single-core CPU, we recommend disabling auto-updates. Our testing shows that the combination of running CPU intensive throughput tests and/or OWAMP tests with high write activity to the measurement archive on top of the new scheduling system does not perform as desired beyond more than a few tests. Such a setup may be fine if you plan to use it as an ad-hoc tester as opposed to for use with dedicated measurements.  It is worth noting here that this is below the minimum recommendations for 3.5.

- If your host has a CPU with two cores but the clock speed is below 2GHz or less than 4 GB of RAM, we recommend using your best judgement. If you are running a couple dozen tests or less you are likely fine with regards to CPU. 4GB has been the memory recommendation for many years on the toolkit, and if you are below that and running a bundle without the measurement archive you may be fine as well. If you are running on less than 4GB with a local measurement archive, we encourage you to add memory or disable auto-updates (and we would have recommended this the last few release as well).

- If your host has a CPU with at least 2 cores, a clock speed of at least 2 GHz and 4GB memory, you should be good, no action is needed. We recommend keeping auto-updates on in this case.

 

If your hardware is up to specification, but you would be more comfortable disabling auto-updates for the time-being you are free to do so as well. We will be sharing all of this information again in the coming weeks. Also note that while we do not have a firm final release date set, we will set one multiple weeks in advance and share this information again multiple times to prepare people. We will also be making a large push to update documentation and provide other resources on the great new things you can do with perfSONAR 4.0. Please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime.

 

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team