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XMLAbout this software
The old way: Prior attempts at web front ends for Grid Engine often involved simple HTML markup of the plaintext 'qstat' output. New, more powerful methods are available now that Grid Engine status information can be obtained in XML format.
xml-qstat is an attempt to do something useful with the XML status information that Grid Engine is now able to produce. Grid Engine is also known as "N1 Grid Engine", "N1GE" and "SGE".
In previous attempts to build web based Grid Engine monitoring tools, the output from text based Grid status and monitoring tools was parsed and wrapped into simple web CGI's:
Now that Grid Engine can output XML, brittle text-parsing and pattern matching techniques should no longer be necessary. Instead, one can use XSLT transformations to render Grid Engine XML into a wide variety of output formats. xml-qstat represents one such attempt.
At it's heart, xml-qstat consists of a collection of stylesheets written in XSL. The stylesheets can be used with a XSLT transformation engine to change raw Grid Engine XML data into convenient formats such as XHTML and RSS. Once the grid data has been manipulated into XHTML we can then apply other web technologies such as CSS, DHTML and JavaScript to create fairly sophisticated web based tools for Grid Engine status reporting and monitoring. The Apache Cocoon framework supplies the XML transformation and web publishing engine.Overview & Features
The new way: XSLT allows for sophisticated XML transformations into various formats including dynamic web pages and RSS feeds.
The screenshots and demo pages will give a better view of what this software is currently capable of.
xml-qstat consists of a set of files and folders designed to function as a self contained web application within the Apache Cocoon XML publishing framework. Most of the work involved in developing this package centers on creating and improving the XSL stylesheets that guide the transformation of Grid Engine XML into various desired output formats. Quite a bit of effort also went into the various JavaScript, CSS stylesheets and other "web design" elements although far more work is required to really make the web interface shine.
A basic overview of some of the built-in features:
- XML status data is from Grid Engine is cached to a local file at a user definable interval. The cached XML is used for display rendering, preventing the SGE 'qmaster' daemon from having to be contacted each time a page is accessed. Information about individual jobs is is still fetched dynamically
- Primary view can be rendered in "standard" ('show me everything') mode or a special "terse" ('summary') view can be used for very large or very active clusters. This is to handle clusters with thousands of nodes or hundreds of thousands of active grid jobs
- Per user job sorting. Users can view their own pending/active jobs simply by surfing to /xmlqstat/(username)-jobs.html"
- Sensible Job Detail handling. The URL "/xmlqstat/job/(jobID).html" can be used used for any active or pending job of any type. Custom rendering is done via detecting the features and type of XML, not by altering URL's or making the user do anything.
- Automatic detection of unsupported browser types
- Custom XHTML views for automatically detected Sony PSP browser agents
- Valid Atom 1.0 syndication feed
- Extensible XSL driven documentation framework
- Browser cookies used to persist user display preferences.
