globus-fork-starter(8) Start and monitor a fork job

SYNOPSIS

globus-fork-starter

DESCRIPTION

The globus-fork-starter program is executes jobs specified on its standard input stream, recording the job state changes to a file defined in the $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-fork.conf configuration file. It runs until its standard input stream is closed and all jobs it is managing have terminated. The log generated by this program can be used by the SEG to provide job state changes and exit codes to the GRAM service. The globus-fork-starter program is typically started by the fork GRAM module.

The globus-fork-starter program expects its input to be a series of task definitions, separated by the newline character, each representing a separate job. Each task definition contains a number of fields, separated by the colon character. The first field is always the literal string 100 indicating the message format, the second field is a unique job tag that will be distinguish the reply from this program when multiple jobs are submitted. The rest of fields contain attribute bindings. The supported attributes are:

directory

Working directory of the job

environment

Comma-separated list of strings defining environment variables. The form of these strings is var=value

count

Number of processes to start

executable

Full path to the executable to run

arguments

Comma-separated list of command-line arguments for the job

stdin

Full path to a file containing the input of the job

stdout

Full path to a file to write the output of the job to

stderr

Full path to a file to write the error stream of the job

Within each field, the following characters may be escaped by preceding them with the backslash character:

• backslash (\)

• semicolor (;)

• comma (,)

• equal (=)

Additionally, newline can be represented within a field by using the escape sequence \n.

For each job the globus-fork-starter processes, it replies by writing a single line to standard output. The replies again consist of a number of fields separated by the semicolon character.

For a successful job start, the first field of the reply is the literal 101, the second field is the tag from the input, and the third field is a comma-separated list of SEG job identifiers which consist the concatenation of a UUID and a process id. The globus-fork-starter program will write state changes to the SEG log using these job identifiers.

For a failure, the first field of the reply is the literal 102, the second field is the tag from the input, the third field is the integer representation of a GRAM erorr code, and the fourth field is an string explaining the error.

ENVIRONMENT

If the following variables affect the execution of globus-fork-starter

GLOBUS_LOCATION

Path to Globus Toolkit installation. This is used to locate the globus-fork.conf configuration file.

FILES

$GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-fork.conf

Path to fork SEG configuration file.

LAST SEARCHED