Link Sessions

Altair Analytics Workbench can use Hub to launch remote Altair SLC sessions. Rather than Altair Analytics Workbench having to make an explicit SSH connection to a particular host to launch an Altair SLC session on that host, it makes a request to the Altair SLC Hub for it to launch a link session. The Altair SLC Hub schedules the Altair SLC session to be run on a suitable node within the Altair SLC Hub cluster.

Execution Profiles and Launch Configurations

Altair SLC Hub has a concept of an execution profile that governs various aspects of how a workload is run, such as selecting a version of Altair SLC, defining startup environment variables, or constraints over where the workload is run in the cluster. For more information see Execution Profiles.

Within the Altair Analytics Workbench, a user can define one or more "servers" each of which represent a single startable Altair SLC. Multiple servers can be defined, either for the purposes of having Altair SLC with different startup options, different versions of Altair SLC, or to enable multiple sessions and so multiple programs, to be run at once.

When configuring a server in Altair Analytics Workbench, part of the setup is the Launch Configuration. The launch configurations presented to the user in Altair Analytics Workbench are provided by Altair SLC Hub from querying the defined execution profiles and returning those execution profiles that the user has permission to access.

In this way, Altair SLC Hub execution profiles provide the user with the ability to select from a list of administrator-defined configurations governing various aspects such as the version of Altair SLC used, where the Altair SLC session is run, the startup system options it has, the environment variables that are set and so on.

Setting System Options

The environment and options of a link session are controlled by the execution profile that it is run under. The execution profiles allow setting environment variables, this can be useful to add database drivers to the lookup PATH or to set Altair SLC system options.

Don't override WPS_OPTIONS

Hub sets the WPS_OPTIONS environment variable to pass the Hub connection details to Altair SLC, so it is not recommended to set this option.

To set Altair SLC system option such as the system encoding, create an environment variable with the key as WPSV5_OPTIONS and the value as containing all the Altair SLC system options as they would be passed to command line, for example:

-ENCODING UTF-8 -NOHUB_AUTOLIBS