News 03 Jan 2007

MTT News for 3 January, 2007

MTT 2.0 is [nearly] ready!

MTT 2.0 tutorial

There is a proposed MTT 2.0 tutorial teleconference on Tuesday, January 9 2007, noon US eastern time (immediately following the OMPI weekly teleconference). This teleconference will give a tutorial in MTT 2.0. The point of the teleconference is to show everyone how to use the reporter because MTT generates a LOT of data, and it REALLY HELPS A LOT if you understand the basics of how the data is organized before you go searching for information.

The tutorial will be broken down into two parts:

1. How to use the MTT reporter (i.e., use the web form to query for correctness and performance regression results in the database).
2. How to run the MTT client, with particular attention paid to the new features that were introduced since MTT 1.0 (i.e., helping users migrate from 1.x to 2.0).

We are assuming that there will be a larger number of people interested in #1 than #2. So it's expected that people may drop off the teleconference after #1.

Here are a couple of wiki pages that will be referenced during the tutorial:

• Walk-through of reporter.php: UseCase
• Guide for reporter.php: WebUIGuide

New in MTT 2.0

Brief overview of some new features in 2.0.

Sever-side / General

• Distinguish between tests that pass, fail, timeout, and are intentionally skipped.
• Added support for latency and bandwidth performance testing and reporting. Verified with NetPIPE and IMB MPI test suites.
• Leaner, faster, and more intuitive web user interface
• More flexible querying (e.g., multiple selection, regular expressions, sortable columns, and cherry-picked reports)
• Clickable summary reports for drilling down
• Query screen and reports on one screen (no frames needed)
• Super short URLs
• Display 100 rows at a time

Client-side

• Added support for environment modules (http://modules.sf.net/)
• Dramatically better memory utilization (especially for large numbers of test runs)
• Add some "progress bar"-like output to --verbose output so that users can see how far along the tests are
• Added "--trial" option to MTT client to allow testing of the MTT client/INI file setup itself without submitting potentially erroneous / bad results data into the MTT results database
• Print [somewhat] better messages about errors with INI files MTT client now distinguishes between specifying tests to run and analyzing their results (e.g., correctness and performance)

Schedule for the MTT 2.0 rollout

These are by no means do-or-die dates, but rather a flexible timetable.

• 1/3
  • OMPI core testers start switching to start using MTT 2.0
  • Nightly e-mails show both 1.0 and 2.0 test results
• 1/19
  • Everyone should be running MTT 2.0
  • Main web site will roll-over from ~emallove to open-mpi.org/mtt
  • MTT 1.0 database is archived and dropped
  • Nightly e-mails only show 2.0 results
• 1/26
  • Everyone should resume running from the ompi-core-testers branch (which will now be 2.0)*
  • SVN trunk will roll-over to ompi-core-testers
  • SVN trunk goes back to "unstable" status for main-line development
  • Ethans MTT area goes away

MTT 1.0 to MTT 2.0 Transition Steps

1. svn checkout https://svn.open-mpi.org/svn/mtt/trunk
2. Template your INI file(s) off of ompi-core-template.ini.
   • There are new fields and values that can be used; please read the ompi-core-template.ini carefully. When in doubt, send mail to the MTT users mailing list.
3. Like before, several parameters in [Reporter: IU database] need to be set:

     mttdatabase_url=http://www.open-mpi.org/~emallove/mtt/submit/
     mttdatabase_username=you must set this value
     mttdatabase_password=you must set this value

1. Your results will be available via the mtt-results mailing list and via Ethans MTT page

Help

Please email the MTT users mailing list with question and comments.