Subject: Re: CCL:Queueing System and Linux cluster

From: Marcel Turcotte <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 May 2000 11:12:49 +0100

Hi Valentine,

We selected PBS (Portable Batch System)

    http://pbs.mrj.com/

because,

* It's free.

* Works well with PVM and MPI.  It's more flexible than the
  traditional NQS.  You don't have to create queues on each node, you
  don't have to pre-partition the nodes, each job requests the number
  of nodes it needs; as the nodes are seen as a collection and this makes
  it easier to work with PVM and MPI.

* Since version 2.2, the notion of virtual processors has been
  introduced which allows to take advantage of cheap dual- or
  quad-processors machines.  Prior to 2.2 there was two kinds of
  nodes: single processor or time shared, but time shared is
  inadequate for machines with a small number of processors.

* File staging.

* Comes with a library of schedulers, but the user can also write
  his/her own scheduler in C, BASL (PBS's own C-like language) or
  tcl.

* Properties to nodes, for example one can ask for a node with large
  memory and a local copy of some database.

* It's got nice tcl/tk management tools.

* Well supported and open source.

* Comes with API.

* Used by SGI.

Here we've been using it for about a year or so and we're quite happy
about it, we've got one cluster of about 15 SGIs and one Linux cluster
of 25 x 500MHz PIII.

Hope this helps,
Marcel

Valentine Ananikov <[email-masked]> writes:

>   Dear CCl members,
> 
> We are going to create a cluster from Linux PC's for quantum
> chemistry calculations. The question arose what kind of
> Queueing System should be used.
> 
> As I know, NQS and DQS are very popular queueing system, but
> may be some others as well. Of course, an ideal version
> should be easy to install, menage and use.
> 
> Which system would be preferred for Linux based PC's ?
> Is the answer the same from users' and administrators' points
> of view?
> 
> will be summarized,
> Valentin.

-- 
Marcel Turcotte                          Biomolecular Modelling Laboratory
[email-masked]                 Imperial Cancer Research Fund
Phone/Fax +[44]-(020)-7269-3348/3258     PO Box 123, 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields
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