Load balancer V2 for ALICE

In collaboration with the Amsterdam University of Applied sciences and CERN a load balancer is being developed for the ALICE O2 project.

Description

The master branch contains an implementation without zookeeper, and uses the icn to maintain the list of the epns and distributes the list to the flps. The zookeepertje branch contains a robust round-robin whitelist implementation, that has autonomous flps that rely on zookeeper to distribute the online epns (the icn only sends a heartbeat to the flps).

The balancer is build out of three parts each with its own purposes and characteristics. Running experiments should have atleast one of each parts running. The InformationControlNode (ICN) orchestrates the experiments and determines parameters such as durations & rate.

• ICN
• FLP
• EPN

Dependencies

To ensure the O2Balancer2 remains functional even years after it has been developed all dependencies need to be made easilty available. To ensure this a special repository is setup which uses git submodules to checkout specific versions of dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/hexoxide/raspberry-dependency.git
cd raspberry-dependency
git checkout O2v2
su root
apt update
apt upgrade
apt install sudo gcc git wget htop make icu-devtools python python-dev ant libcppunit-dev
apt install doxygen graphviz automake autoconf libtool zookeeper libzookeeper-mt-dev
./install-dependencies.sh

Installation

if [ ! -d "build" ]; then mkdir build; fi
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
make -j 2

Running

./icn/icn --control static --severity trace --verbosity high --id 1 --iterations 500 --rate 50 --channel-config name=broadcast,type=pub,method=bind,rateLogging=1,address=tcp://*:5005 name=feedback,type=pull,method=bind,rateLogging=1,address=tcp://*:5000
./flp/flp --severity trace --verbosity high --id 1 --bytes-per-message 2097152 --channel-config name=broadcast,type=sub,method=connect,rateLogging=1,address=tcp://localhost:5005
./epn/epn --control static --severity trace --verbosity high --id 1 --primary-interface lo --num-flp 10 --channel-config name=1,type=pull,method=bind,address=tcp://localhost:5555,rateLogging=1 name=feedback,type=push,method=connect,address=tcp://localhost:5000

Operational parameters

Debugging

Start individual applications of the O2 balancer using gdb and be sure to pipe the output to a file or null. Be sure that the binaries are compiled with gcc -g -O0 arguments by setting the cmake DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to Debug.

gdb -tui PATH_TO_BINARY
run ARGUMENTS > output.log