Blackfish

This is the Open OnDemand application for the Blackfish project at Princeton University. It runs the Blackfish server on a Della visualization node with minimal resources. Once the server is launched, users authenticate and interact with the server in their browser via the Blackfish UI.

Deployment

Setup

For STAGE = 'dev', 'share':

cd $HOME/ondemand/$STAGE && git clone https://github.com/princeton-ddss/blackfish-ondemand.git

That's it. The application automatically:

• Creates a per-user blackfish-ondemand conda environment
• Creates a default profile with home_dir=~/.blackfish-ondemand
• Installs the correct version of blackfish-ai (specified in .blackfish-version)

Updating Blackfish Version

The required Blackfish version is specified in .blackfish-version using a compatible release specifier (e.g., ~=0.4.0). This allows patch updates automatically while requiring explicit updates for new minor versions.

To update:

1. Test the new version of blackfish-ai in the dev environment
2. Update .blackfish-version with the new version specifier (e.g., ~=0.5.0)
3. Commit and push the change
4. Pull the change to $HOME/ondemand/$STAGE

Users will automatically get the new version on their next session.

Testing

To test changes to blackfish-ondemand, checkout the branch and run the application:

cd $HOME/ondemand/dev/blackfish-ondemand
git fetch origin
git checkout pri-123-fix-the-thing
git pull origin

Production

Pull the latest changes to the production directory:

cd $HOME/ondemand/share/blackfish-ondemand
git pull origin main

Service Updates

Updating service versions is simply a matter of updating the default image version specified in the Blackfish source code. Ensure the new image version is available in the shared cache directory at /scratch/gpfs/DDSS/.blackfish/images.