On Oct 25, 2006, at 10:37 AM, Josh Hursey wrote:
The discussion started with the bug characteristics of v1.2 versus
the trunk.
Gotcha.
It seemed from the call that IU was the only institution that can
asses this via MTT as noone else spoke up. Since people were
interested in seeing things that were breaking I suggested that I
start forwarding the IU internal MTT reports (run nightly and
weekly) to the test...@open-mpi.org. This was meet by Brain
insisting that it would result in "thousands" of emails to the
development list. I clarified that it is only 3 - 4 messages a day
from IU. However if all other institutions do this then it would be
a bunch of email (where 'a bunch' would still be less than
'thousands'). That's how we got to a 'we need a single summary
presented to the group' comment. It should be noted that we brought
up IU sending to the 'test...@open-mpi.org' list as a bandaid until
MTT could do it better.
How about sending them to me and Ethan?
This single summary can be email or a webpage that people can
check. Rich said that he would prefer a webpage, and noone else
really had a comment. That got us talking about the current summary
page that MTT generates. Tim M mentioned that the current website
is difficult to figure out how to get the answers you need. I
agree, it is hard [usability] for someone to go to the summary page
and answer the question "So what failed from IU last night, and how
does that differ from Yesterday -- e.g., what regressed and
progressed yesterday at IU?". The website is flexible enough to due
it, but having a couple of basic summary pages would be nice for
basic users. What that should look like we can discuss further.
Agreed; we aren't super-fond of the current web page, either. Do you
guys want to have a teleconf to go over the current status of MTT,
where you want it to go, etc.? I consider IU's input here quite
important, since you're the ones pushing the boundaries, flexing
MTT's muscles, etc.
The IU group really likes the emails that we currently generate. A
plain-text summary of the previous run. I posted copies on the MTT
bug tracker here:
http://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/mtt/ticket/61
Currently we have not put the work in to aggregate the runs, so for
each ini file that we run we get 1 email to the IU group. This is
fine for the moment, but as we add the rest of the clusters and
dimensions in the testing matrix we will need MTT to aggregate the
results for us and generate such an email.
Ok.
We created another ticket yesterday to make a new MTT Reporter (our
internal plugins) that duplicates this output format. It actually
shouldn't be that hard -- we don't have to do parsing to get the
numbers that you're reporting; we have access to the actual data. So
it's mostly caching the data, calculating the totals that you're
calculating, and printing in your output format.
Ethan has some other short tasks to do before he gets to this, but
its near the top of the priority list. You can see the current
workflow on the wiki (this is a living document; it keeps changing as
requirements, etc. change):
http://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/mtt/wiki/TaskPlan
So I think the general feel of the discussion is that we need the
following from MTT:
- A 'basic' summary page providing answers to some general
frequently asked queries. The current interface is too advanced for
the current users.
We have the summary.php page, but I personally have never found it
too useful. :-)
We're getting towards a full revamp of reporter.php (got some other
tasks to complete first, but we're definitely starting to think about
it) -- got any ideas / input? Our "haven't thought about it much
yet" idea is to be more menu/Q-A driven with a few common queries
easily available (rather than a huge, complicated single screen).
- A summary email [in plain-text preferably] similar to the one
that IU generated showing an aggregation of the previous nights
results for (a) all reporters (b) my institution [so I can track
them down and file bugs].
For the moment, we don't have the dynamic capability for you to login
to the web page, create a report, and say "mail this to me nightly".
However, Ethan can make up custom reports on the server quite easily
-- if you want some IU-specific reports, just file a ticket and Ethan
can Make It So.
- 1 email a day on the previous nights testing results.
That's what we intended for the mails that are coming today, but it
seemed to not be sufficient -- we ended up with 4 nightly mails, one
for each relevant phase failures and a 4th for showing stderr of mpi
installs.
Some relevant bugs currently in existence:
http://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/mtt/ticket/92
http://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/mtt/ticket/61
http://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/mtt/ticket/94
The other concern is that given the frequency of testing as bugs
appear from the testing someone needs to make sure the bug tracker
is updated. I think the group is unclear about how this is done.
Meaning when a MTT identifies a test as failed whom is responsible
for putting the bug in the bug tracker?
At the moment, I've been manually examining the mails every day and
firing off e-mails to those responsible. However, due to travel last
week and this week, I've gotten quite behind. :-(
The obvious solution is the institution that identified the bug.
[Warning: My opinion] But then that becomes unwieldy for IU since
we have a large testing matrix, and would need to commit someone to
doing this everyday (and it may take all day to properly track a
set of bugs). Also this kind of punishes an institution for testing
more instead of providing incentive to test.
True. I don't know the proper answer to this, either -- I know the
"Jeff look at e-mail" solution doesn't scale well.
------ Page Break -- Context switch ------
In case you all want to know what we are doing here at IU. I
attached to this email our planed MTT testing matrix. Currently we
have BigRed and Odin running the complete matrix less the BLACS
tests. Wotan and Thor will come online as we get more resources to
support them.
In order to do such a complex testing matrix we have various .ini
files that we use. And since some of the dimensions in the matrix
are large we break some of the tests into a couple .ini files that
are submitted concurrently to have them run in a reasonable time.
<MTT-testing-matrix.txt>
Awesome.
I would like to schedule some phone time with you guys and Ethan and
me to talk about what's working, what's not working, etc. One
obvious question I have is: is the INI config file format suitable?
Do we need to do something more complex that would allow
consolidation of your various configurations? ...etc.
--
Jeff Squyres
Server Virtualization Business Unit
Cisco Systems