ARC Control Tower (aCT) is a system for submitting and managing payloads on ARC (and other) Computing Elements. It is used as an interface between Panda and Grid sites for the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

aCT consists of two related state-machines - one which controls job submission and management on Computing Elements (CEs) and another which manages an app-specific workflow. Normally the app-specific part creates jobs or pulls work from an external service, converts to ARC XRSL job descriptions, and passes them into the ARC-handling part. Then the ARC part submits jobs, queries their status and downloads the output when they finish. The app part can then do any post-processing of the result.

aCT requires python >= 3.6 and is designed to run in a python virtual environment.

For CentOS 7:

# yum install epel-release

# yum install python-pip nordugrid-arc6-client python36-nordugrid-arc6 git

ARC python bindings are not available in pip so must be installed as a system package.

# yum install nordugrid-arc6-plugins-gridftpjob - for submission to ARC's GridFTP interface

# yum install nordugrid-arc6-plugins-xrootd - for aCT to validate any output files written using the xrootd protocol

# yum install condor - if aCT will submit to HTCondor-CE or CREAM CE

# yum install python3-libselinux - if SELinux is enabled

$ python3 -m venv aCT
$ source aCT/bin/activate
$ pip install git+https://github.com/ARCControlTower/aCT

Then one of two workarounds must be done to use ARC modules in the virtualenv, either create symlinks inside the virtualenv, eg

$ ln -s /usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/_arc.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so aCT/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/
$ ln -s /usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/arc aCT/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/arc

or add the system packages to your python path

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/arc

The actual paths may depend on your system and python version.

aCT requires a database. MySQL/MariaDB is the only officially supported database but work is ongoing to use sqlite. Note that MySQL/MariaDB >= 5.6 is required whereas the default on CentOS 7 is 5.5.

aCT is configured with 2 configuration files, aCTConfigARC.yaml and optional aCTConfigAPP.yaml. The former configures the ARC side of aCT and the latter configures the app-specific side. These files are searched for in the following places in order until found:

$ACTCONFIGARC
$VIRTUAL_ENV/etc/act/aCTConfigARC.yaml
/etc/act/aCTConfigARC.yaml
./aCTConfigARC.yaml

and the same for aCTConfigAPP.yaml. Configuration templates can be found in etc/act in the virtualenv.

The app config must contain at least

modules:
  app:
    - act.app

where app is the app-specific python module. The app config can also contain any app-specific configuration.

Once configuration is set up, the actbootstrap tool should be used to create the necessary database tables.

The actmain tool starts and stops aCT

$ actmain start
Starting aCT... 
$ actmain stop
Stopping aCT...  stopped

Several tools exist to help administer aCT

• actreport: shows a summary of job states and sites for all the jobs in the database
• actbootstrap: create database tables
• actheartbeatwatchdog: checks the database for jobs that have not sent heartbeats for a given time and manually send the heartbeat
• actcriticalmonitor: checks logs for critical error messages in the last hour - can be run in a cron to send emails

Prometheus monitoring can be enabled by setting the port number on which to expose metrics in aCTConfigARC.yaml, eg

monitor:
  prometheusport: 8001

By default only ARC metrics are reported, but app-specific metrics can also be added - see the developers section below.

Experimental client tools exist which allow job management through simple command line tools (act sub, act stat, etc). These tools allow aCT to be used as a generic job submission engine, independent from the ATLAS part.

Developing a new app for aCT is as easy as defining a new sub-module of act. Certain elements of the app files must follow a template:

• __init__.py may define a list of agent processes that will be started by aCT with app_processes = [...]
• aCTBootstrap.py may define a bootstrap() method which will be called by actbootstrap to peform any initialisation
• aCTReport.py may define a report() method which will be called by actreport and can output any app-specific information
• aCTMonitor.py may define a collect() method which yields app-specific Prometheus metrics.

Apart from these there is no limit to the naming or number of app agents.