Deploying to PlanetLab

Deploying Files to PlanetLab Nodes

To deploy your app to PlanetLab use the command below:

pscp -h ''nodes.txt'' -l slice_name -t 180 -p 200 yourapp.tar /home/slice_name/yourapp.tar

Replace slice_name and yourapp.tar with the appropriate values.

The -t switch denotes the timeout period for each node. For example, -t 180 sets the pscp command timeout period to 3 minutes. A "Timeout" status will be returned if the node failed to response within the timeout period.

The -p 200 denotes the max number of parallel threads for the pscp process. A value of 200 means the process will attempt to copy the file to 200 nodes concurrently. Please do not abuse this setting. You will run out of memory if you spawn too many threads.

Executing Remote Commands

You can use pssh to issue a command to all nodes in your slice. For example, the command below will untar yourapp.tar from the above example.

pssh -h nodes.txt -l sfu_games -t 180 -p 200 -o /tmp "tar xvf yourapp.tar"

Installing Java

Below is a series of commands used to deploy Java on PlanetLab.

The content of install_jvm.sh

#!/bin/sh
echo -e "q\nyes\n" | sudo sh jre-linux.bin | grep "\.\.\."

Commands

Download the Linux binary for the Java Runtime Environment

pssh -h nodes.txt -l sfu_games -p 200 -t 600 -o /tmp/test1 "wget -nc http://nsl.cs.sfu.ca/tmp/jre-linux.bin"

Copy the installation shell script to all the nodes in the slice

pscp -h nodes.txt -l sfu_games -t 180 -p 200 install_jvm.sh /home/sfu_games/install_jvm.sh

Make the shell script executable on all the nodes

pssh -h nodes.txt -l sfu_games -p 200 -o /tmp chmod 755 /home/sfu_games/install_jvm.sh

Execute the shell script on all the nodes of the slice

pssh -h nodes.txt -l sfu_games -p 200 -t 300 -o /tmp ./install_jvm.sh