Python | mySQL | Bash | Linux

Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories

Github | Presentation

Background

The genders tool is an open source LLNL tool that stores information about node configurations and is used for cluster configuration management. On each cluster, there exists a file which contains configuration information about a node. The genders file is replicated on each node of the cluster. The genders file can be queried with the command line nodeattr tool.

Motivation

However, there is no way to remotely query the genders file of a node; you have to log into the node and use nodattr. So, in order to solve this problem, we created a centralized database which stores all the genders of all the clusters which can be accessed anywhere in the system.

Process

• We installed libgenders, the python library which functions similarly to nodeattr. We changed the configuration to build on python3 instead of python2.
• We then created the structure of the database. We decided to use mySQL versus a non-relational database like mongoDB the genders structure was easily visualized as a relational schema. 

• Next, we used the python module to query the local genders file  and feed it into the database. This was then adapted to be able to comb through multiple directories.
• Lastly, we created python methods for users to query from the database through the command line. This mimics nodeattr except the information is read from the database.
• After the code was complete, we compiled the code into a python package

What’s Next?

• Ideally, we would want to automatically run the script that updates the database, so that when somebody updates one of the genders files, the database changes as well.

LLNL-WEB-813516
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC