1.0 Introduction

1.1 About this manual

This manual is for system administrators of a Legion system. It explains how to install, run, and manage a new Legion system, how to set security features, and how to use the Legion core objects. It also presents several sample system policies.

There are four Legion manuals, each aimed at a specific type of user, that can be consulted for more information. The others are:

• Basic User Manual: introductory information about the system.
• Developer Manual: information and documentation for programmers working in Legion, and includes information on languages, libraries, core objects, and implementing new Legion objects.
• Reference Manual: detailed information about specific elements of the Legion system.

There are also man pages for all Legion commands included with the system files, and on-line tutorials on the Legion web site.

1.2 Style conventions

The manuals at times refer to path names in Unix directory space and in Legion context space. To avoid confusion, the following style conventions are used throughout Legion documentation:

• Unix, DOS, and local path names appear in this typeface.
• Functions, method names, parameters, flags, command-line utilities (such as rm, cp, and legion_ls), and context path names appear in fixed typeface.

1.3 About Legion

Legion is a grid operating system at the University of Virginia. It is intended to support the construction of wide-area virtual computers, or metasystems, which will allow users to work on a variety of geographically distributed, high-performance machines and workstations. Legion is designed to support large degrees of parallelism in application code and to manage the complexities of the physical system for the user in order to take advantage of this enormous physical infrastructure.

legion@Virginia.edu
http://legion.virginia.edu/