FBSNG Features

The FBSNG system provides users working in a farm environment with many advantages over previous approaches(such as CPS and CPSBatch used in Run I). Some of FBSNG's major features are:

• Flexible Farm Configuration: FBSNG offers a great deal of flexibility in the configuration of a farm. Most of configuration tasks can be performed dynamically without re-starting FBSNG
• Load Balancing: FBSNG dynamically picks which farm node will run a particular task based on the perceived load of the farm. FBSNG does not track resource usage in real time, but assumes that tasks will use resources in a sufficiently well defined manner and that these tasks properly register their processing needs with FBSNG.
• Kerberos support: optionally, FBSNG can use Kerberos v5 to authenticate users or administrators. Also, it can be configured to create Kerberos credentials for batch processes.
• Portability: The majority of FBSNG is written in Python, making it very portable.
• Job Control: FBSNG provides commands to allow users to cancel jobs, or parts of jobs(called sections), as well as change priorities of a section.
• Job Monitoring: Users can get status information on any farm job running on the system. In addition, users can see the status of batch queues and the farm processing nodes.
• Job Queueing: Sections are submitted to batch queues, which may have their own priorities.
• Job History: Job history information is kept by FBSNG for a configurable amount of time. FBSNG provides the history command to access this information.
• Abstract Resources: User defined resources can be defined to individual nodes of the system.
• Global Resources: Resources can be defined that are global to the entire cluster.
• Application Programmers Interface (API): An API is provided that allows access to FBSNG internals.