Cern Week 16

This week my Perl script or quattor module went into production. I build the rpm and then did loads of testing on my cluster. I had to pretty much try all the different scenarios under which my program could be run (Dan: installed a machine... lots of times). There were some minor problems but now it is on swrep (the Cern software repository). Because it was such a huge change I got my own version number. Normally the counting is done 2.0.x or something like that, but because I changed so much I now started the 3.0.0 tree. I did some benchmarking on my code and found that it behaved quite linear.

http://www.ribalba.de/cern2

After some research I found out that the library function, I was calling to execute a shell command, had a sleep(1) in it. The idea behind this is to be sure that all buffers have been flushed before it returns. But this of course has a linear execution time as a result. As I don’t rely on the output I simply created a work around, but for the long run I am thinking of changing my program to be multithreaded.

Further I helped Dan to design his new Aims replacement. A system to distribute pxe images, and get the right machine to boot the right OS.

I had a look at the new Google Android mobile development SDK. It seems to be really cool. I wrote a little “hello world” program in it. Currently I am thinking about something I could write for it. Ideas will come.