pScheduler - The perfSONAR Scheduler

pScheduler is the perfSONAR Scheduler, a system for the scheduling and supervision of automated measurements and sending the results off for storage. It is a complete replacement for the Bandwidth Test Controller (BWCTL), which has been part of perfSONAR since its early days. The core development team conducted an evaluation of BWCTL and BWCTL2 (a re-implementation attempted in 2015) against the list of features and additional sophistication demanded by the perfSONAR’s users. The result of that evaluation was a determination that a clean-slate redesign and reimplementation was the best option to meet the new requirements and enable future enhancements without running afoul of BWCTL’s architectural limitations.

Among the features of the new software are:

• Significantly-improved visibility into prior, current and scheduled future activities
• Easy availability of diagnostic information
• Full-featured, repeating testing for all measurement types baked into the core of the system
• A more-powerful system for imposing policy-based limits on users
• A REST API to make the software-based interfacing to perfSONAR easier
• Standardized, documented data formats based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
• Hooks for supporting unusual use cases, such as measurements on GÉANT’s MD-VPN platform

The most significant of pScheduler’s new features is extensibility. A standard API has been defined for interfacing with implementations of tests (types of measurements), tools (programs which make the measurements) and archivers (programs to transfer measurement results to various kinds long-term storage). There have been many users wanting to integrate less-than-mainstream applications with perfSONAR but have been stymied by a lack of core development team resources. This architecture will allow members of the community to participate in development of new tests, tools and archivers with minimal assistance from the core team. The larger ecosystem of available tools will help drive adoption perfSONAR in areas where it would not have been possible previously.

Building pScheduler

Documentation on building pScheuler is in the Developer's Guide, which can be found in the docs directory. This directory is not currently part of the build proces and must be built manually. (See the next section.) The quickest way to build pScheduler is in the provided Docker build environment. Run the following commands to build pScheduler:

docker-compose up --build -d
docker-compose exec -w /app pscheduler_build make

You can also enter the container for debugging purposes or to try pscheduler after building with the command docker-compose exec pscheduler_build bash. The pscheduler code can be found in /app. Note this is not a shared directory so changes to code in the container will not be reflected in the code outside the container.

Building the documentation

There is a problem builing the documentation on CentOS 7 because TeXLive was significantly changed and some of the packages we need aren't as easily installed. (TODO: Fix this.)

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem (TODO: fix this), so you'll need a system with LaTeX to build the manual.

1. yum -y install texlive-latex
2. cd docs
3. make

This will produce PDFs of all documents.