LGI Notes

At BiG Grid, we're working on the Leiden Grid Infrastructure. For our internal use, it was useful to have a common scratch space for open items and notes. That's here.

There is a mailing address for BiG Grid LGI, LGIportal and R-portal related questions at rportal-support@biggrid.nl (for questions from users of the infrastructure) and lgiportal-devel@biggrid.nl (for development-related discussion).

Links & Documents

• Software components
  • LGI wiki, official LGI home
  • lgipilot, a pilot-job framework based on LGI (code)
  • LGIportal, a PHP web portal for easy interaction with LGI
  • Rlgi, easy access to LGI from the programming language R (read more)
  • The BiG Grid R Portal (hosted combination of the above)
  • ClassicalBuilder, a Java GUI interacting directly with LGI (external)
• Presentations
  • May 2012: Leiden Computational Chemistry group (slides)
  • Feb 2012: BioAssist meeting (slides)

Python Bindings

The official LGI distribution contains a single LGI class for Python clients. This has been rewritten and expanded, including the ability to write Python resources, in the LGIportal LGI module.

It would be useful to have a self-contained Python module, and upload it to the Python Package Index, which is the standard place for Python packages. And distribution packages can easily be made from those. Work has begun on this Python package, but a few things are still needed:

• Check for changes in currently used Python modules in the LGIpilot tree.
• If possible without making normal use very clumsy, maintain backward compatibility with official distribution. Name and order of parameters comes to mind.
• Synchronise the API for the Python and PHP implementations (Java?) (see here). The R package is significantly different that it does not need to be considered, neither the C++ implementation.

Client Configuration

LGI client configuration is generally done by putting files in ~/.LGI. LGIportal, however, has the ability to download a single file with all configuration and credentials, so that the user can just save the single file and use desktop tools to access the LGI project server.

It would be useful to have all existing LGI clients to understand this single configuration file. There is a description of this file-format. Also the use of environment variables to use non-standard configuration file (directories) would be useful.

Currently only Rlgi supports this (in addition to reading configuration from a directory). There is an LGI branch for the command-line utilities. The C++ implementation now does: if the environment variable LGI_CONFIG is set, that is used as configuration (directory or file); otherwise ~/.LGI, otherwise ~/LGI.cfg (for easy download-and-go, e.g. on Windows). This would require some more thought. We thought it would be useful to do it this way:

• if the LGI_CONFIG environment variable is set, that is used as configuration, either as directory or file
• otherwise, when exists, the file ~/.LGI.cfg is read
• otherwise, when exists, the directory ~/.LGI is read
• otherwise, when exists, the file ~/LGI.cfg is read; so that a user can just download it and save it in an existing directory

Automated Package Builds / LGI git mirror

TODO

Merging upstream Ganga changes into lgipilot

TODO