Add verbosity options/levels/role-appropriate feedback to cluster provisioning process

hpc / hpc-collab

This project provides provisioned HPC cluster models using underlying virtualization mechanisms.

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Add verbosity options/levels/role-appropriate feedback to cluster provisioning process #126

Open katyfelkner opened 4 years ago

katyfelkner commented 4 years ago

The current cluster provisioning process is extremely verbose. This is great for HPC researchers and sysadmins, but it might be overkill/potentially confusing for some end users in other scientific disciplines. I propose adding optionals verbosity flags to the 'make up' alias. Something like:

v: show nodes being provisioned and checking prereqs, but don't show a lot of detail about packages being installed --v: mentions every step of the process but doesn't list details of packages/versions ---v: maximum verbosity, like now

I don't know how easy or hard this is to implement. I also don't think it's that high priority. But it's an idea.

katyfelkner commented 4 years ago

I can't add labels to things in this repo but I would label this as "enhancement"

ssenator commented 4 years ago

There is an existing VERBOSE flag in clusters/common/flag. It can be cleared by removing the file: clusters/common/flag/VERBOSE. It can also be made more verbose by text values in that file. So, at the moment there are 3 levels of verbosity: none (remove that flag file), on/true (flag file exists), see more information (flag file exists and contains the string "true+")

During some of the steps in the provisioning process, it is set to "true+" if it was previously "true", because they take so long without providing feedback. Currently those steps are the software build process BuildSW() and UserVerificationJobs() in clusters/common/bin/provision.sh.

katyfelkner commented 4 years ago

I think the setup you describe makes a lot of sense during development and early use. When we start releasing the tool to more users, I think we might want to downgrade the default or add another mode between "no feedback" (off) and "a firehose of information" (on). It might also help to add some time estimates into the feedback the user sees if that is easy to do. E.g. "now provisioning vcfs, this usually takes around 20 minutes"