3 Customizing the UNICORE 5 client for DEISA

UNICORE allows you to customise the client according to your needs. Figure 5 shows how to change the path of your job directory and of other directories. Issue

Settings → User defaults

and select Path.

Equally important is the selection of the Gateways (i.e. DEISA sites) that are always shown by default. Since all DEISA Gateways are connected in a full mesh, it is sufficient to select only one active gateway (the one of your Home Site – but when this Gateway is down and cannot be reached, you can select another one) and have it shown (see Figure 5). Click

Settings → Configure sites

and tick the boxes of the sites that you wish to see. It is good practice to have the certificates of all gateways in the keystore. In case your primary site is down, you can activate any of the other ones very quickly.

This additional configuration step has two major advantages:

• The start-up process of UNICORE is much faster. During start-up of the UNICORE Client phase each Gateway is contacted and the resource descriptions of all so-called Virtual Sites, or Vsites, (i.e. of all connected DEISA resources) are fetched and made known to the client. This means that instead of updating N resource descriptions, N² contacts have to be made. Although the updates are executed in parallel, the start-up time doubles at least. Sometimes a particular Gateway – which you will probably never be using – has a problem connecting to a Vsite. Then your client will be blocked till the connection times out.
• The Job Monitor area (see Figure 5) and also the UNICORE Site area (see Figure 6) is less full and the actions are less error prone. As described above an update of the Job Monitor is much faster since the information is fetched only once and not N times.

In addition, if you know that you will not use some of the sites at all you can exclude them, too, as shown in Figure 7.