The release 0.16.1 of GêBR comes with astonishing new features. Up to now GêBR established direct connections with processing servers. From now on, there is a new player, the Maestro. GêBR connects to a Maestro and it provides the processing servers under its domain. Since the Maestro controls the processing servers, it has the right to select which one will be responsible for execute a job requested by the user. This selection takes many factors into account, like the working loads of each server and the speed of their CPU’s.
Better than that, the Maestro can put many servers together to cooperate to conclude a job. Whenever a job can be split into small independent parts, the Maestro can distribute them to several servers. The Maestro is still in charge of collecting all responses, merge them and send it back to GêBR, where the user can inspect it as a whole.
The user can still interfere in this process, choosing how agressive the Maestro will be in the hunting for resources.
Great news: now parameters of programs can be defined by variables from the dictionary and employing arithmetic expressions. This feature gives great flexibility to the user to parameterize programs. Once a program had its parameters defined by variables (or arithmetic expressions employing variables) from the dictionary, changes in the dictionary propagates to programs automaticaly.
Quantities defined in the dictionary can be shared among all flows of a line, for example. So, using variables to represent common quantities is the easiest way to keep all parameters consistently defined through the flows of a line.
Loop support is the second major improvement in this release. A flow can be executed multiple times (with slightly different parameters), by setting an iteration loop.
Besides, a large collection of processing flows, based on the well-stablished seismic processing package SU, is released together with SU menus. Those samples are accessable through Help/Samples in the menubar.
As usual, binary packages are distributed to major Linux distros.
Two major features in this release: automatic report generation, and user documentation for the GêBR interface.
From now on, GêBR takes care of generating detailed reports for flows and lines (project are still to come). The flow’s report brings the list of programs in the flow, input and output files selected, and the parameters of each program (with customizable level of detail). The user still has the opportunity to include its own comments to such reports. The line’s report, besides the list of the flows in the lines, can also include the flow’s reports to each flow of the line. In this way, an text can be easily assembled to document all flows of a line and the line itself.
Furthermore, new versions of the menus for SU (now with sample projects demonstrating for many common tasks in seismic processing) and Shell Tools are also being released.
Great effort was done to bring an up to date documentation to the GêBR interface, both in English and in Portuguese. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.