Users Guide Introduction

The DALiuGE system can and has been used on a huge range of different size systems. It can easily be deployed on a person’s laptop, across multiple personal machines as well as small and large compute clusters. That flexibility comes with some difficulty in describing how the system is intended to be used, since that is obviously dependent on the way it is deployed. This guide mainly describes the basic usage of the system as it would appear when deployed on a single machine or a small cluster. Other deployment scenarios and their respective differences are described in the Operational concepts chapter. The purpose of DALiuGE is to allow users to develop and execute complex parallel workflows and as such it’s real strength only shines when it comes to massive deployments. However, the basic usage does not really change at all and many real-life, mostly weak scaling workflows can be scaled up and down by changing just one or a few parameters.

Hopefully you will be able to identify yourself with one (or more) of the five user groups:

  1. Scientists who want to reduce their data using a existing workflows.

  2. Scientists/developers who want to design a new workflow using existing components.

  3. Scientists/developers who want to develop new component descriptions.

  4. Developers who want to develop new components.

  5. Developers who want to develop a new algorithm.

This guide covers only the frist two groups, the last three are covered in the DALiuGE Component Developers Guide chapter. There is also a Startup and Shutdown Guide section to explain how to use the system in small deployments.

This guide does also not cover the usage of the EAGLE editor in any more detail than required, since that is covered in the EAGLE documentation.