[Yt-dev] RAFT issues and things to bring up

Matthew Turk matthewturk at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 16:07:03 PDT 2009


Hi guys,

So I gave my first YT tutorial using the RAFT today.  I ran the RAFT
on Triton and accessed it locally; everything "just worked" and we
were very productive.

There are some issues that still need to be investigated and examined,
which I am including here.  I'd appreciate it if anyone who has used
this could contribute their thoughts.

  * Currently, not all the widgets for interaction inside the raft do
not work with just Raft.  They have some deeper Sage dependencies.
I've spoken with people at the Sage project, and they are going to be
working on rewriting the notebook engine at the end of this month,
which will fix this issue.
  * Printing PDFs of the notebook lets images jut off the edge of the
page, which ends up cropping them.
  * MPI jobs can't currently be dispatched.  It's not clear to me, but
I personally believe this can be overcome and that we will be able to
launch parallel processes from within the RAFT.  Launching them from a
queuing system might not be possible, but on a single machine I think
it'll be possible.
  * Currently everything is stored in ~/.spd, but I'd like to change
that to ~/.raft.
  * Distributing worksheets and converting down to Python code is a
bit sticky at the moment, but I'm going to investigate ways to make
this easier.
  * I've asked around a bit about uploading worksheets to a repo and
then downloading them remotely.  If this requires little to no effort
to set up on the server end -- i.e., turnkey solution -- I'll write up
something to upload from the notebook interface.  (If such a thing
doesn't already exist, and it might!)

Does anyone else have anything to offer?  Other issues or sticky bits
that I have overlooked?

As far as releases go, updating the spkgs and builds is pretty easy --
I am wondering if maybe we should just aim for a monthly release
schedule for RAFT, rather than version numbers.

We now have builds at http://raft.enzotools.org/files/ for the
following systems:

kraken
osx
ranger
rhel4-x86_64
triton
ubuntu32

Thoughts, anyone?

-Matt



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