From chemistry-request@server.ccl.net Sun Jan 28 10:50:29 2001 Received: from bbhm.na.pg.com (bbhm.na.pg.com [192.44.184.159]) by server.ccl.net (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f0SFoTw05622 for ; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 10:50:29 -0500 X-ExtMailInfo: pandora.na.pg.com [155.118.176.101] Received: from pandora.na.pg.com (pandora.na.pg.com [155.118.176.101]) by bbhm.na.pg.com (8.8.8/8.10.1/D1r2) with ESMTP id f0SFfmB07528; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 10:41:48 -0500 (EST) Received: from morpheus.na.pg.com (morpheus.na.pg.com [143.5.24.124]) by pandora.na.pg.com (SGI-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA47547; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 10:45:15 -0500 (EST) Received: from pg.com by morpheus.na.pg.com via ESMTP (980427.SGI.8.8.8/930416.SGI.AUTO) id KAA85208; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 10:47:53 -0500 (EST) Sender: laidig@pg.com Message-ID: <3A743F28.8FE4DD21@pg.com> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 10:47:53 -0500 From: Bill Laidig X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61C-SGI [en] (X11; I; IRIX64 6.5 IP30) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: CHEMISTRY@ccl.net, stein.pandora@pg.com Subject: Queuing Software Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit All, We have been looking into and testing queuing software for a while and found nothing very satisfactory. All have drawbacks such as price, lack of adequate cross-platform support or features. I am interested in what queuing software CCL users USE on their systems and how they like this software. I will summarize responses to the list. By the way, we are looking for a queuing system that: a) Works across both SGI Irix and Linux clusters (NQS works well on linux, but we are having problems getting it work well on SGI's if I remember the problems our systems manager mentioned). b) Is not extremely expensive (LSF, for example, is quite nice, but would be rather expensive to implement across our whole system) c) Is full featured in terms of queue control (priority, job limits, processor limits, time limits, ability to suspend and track jobs...) d) Can treat a group of machines as a single queue (for our cluster) Thanks in advance, Bill -- ************************************************************************ * "Like jewels in a crown, the precious stones glittered in the * * queen's round metal hat." - Jack Handey * * * * Bill Laidig * * The Procter & Gamble Co. tel 513-627-2857 fax - 1233 * * Miami Valley Laboratories laidig@pg.com (preferred) * * P.O. Box 538707 laidig.wd@pg.com * * Cincinnati, OH 45253-8707 * ************************************************************************ From chemistry-request@server.ccl.net Sun Jan 28 19:10:12 2001 Received: from bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk (IDENT:root@bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk [163.1.35.134]) by server.ccl.net (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f0T0ABw07680 for ; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 19:10:12 -0500 Received: from localhost (ben@localhost) by bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.8.7) with ESMTP id AAA18170; Mon, 29 Jan 2001 00:10:11 GMT Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 00:10:10 +0000 (GMT) From: Ben Webb To: Bill Laidig cc: CHEMISTRY@ccl.net, stein.pandora@pg.com Subject: Re: CCL:Queuing Software In-Reply-To: <3A743F28.8FE4DD21@pg.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Bill Laidig wrote: > We have been looking into and testing queuing software for a while and > found nothing very satisfactory. All have drawbacks such as price, lack > of adequate cross-platform support or features. I am interested in what > queuing software CCL users USE on their systems and how they like this > software. We use Open PBS (www.openpbs.com) here and it works well for our needs (distribution of single-processor and MPI jobs across a network of Linux-based workstations and compute nodes). It is available under a fairly liberal licence, and is free for both commercial and non-commercial use provided you are registered with its owners. The "P" in PBS stands for "portable" and as such it works on a variety of platforms (although we've only tried it on Intel and Alpha Linux boxes so far here). It is fairly feature-rich by default, but since the source code is available, you can augment its features (or "bugs" if you like ;) with your own. If that's still not enough, you can get the "full" version, PBS Pro, but that costs money... > a) Works across both SGI Irix and Linux clusters (NQS works well on > linux, but we are having problems getting it work well on SGI's if I > remember the problems our systems manager mentioned). If you've used NQS in the past, PBS should be relatively easy to pick up, as it's based (at least in part) on NQS. There are even utilities for converting NQS job scripts to PBS format. > c) Is full featured in terms of queue control (priority, job limits, > processor limits, time limits, ability to suspend and track jobs...) This is all possible by default, I believe, with the exception of processor limits (you can restrict jobs by nodes - machines - but not by processors). Patches are available for this functionality, however (for instance, from our own site, http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/pbs/). PBS is flexible in that this kind of thing is generally determined by a dedicated scheduler program, which you can either provide from scratch (in one of three different languages) or can derive from the example "FIFO" scheduler. > d) Can treat a group of machines as a single queue (for our cluster) This is the default behaviour. More complex behaviour can be obtained by tinkering with the scheduler. Most "unusual" requirements have already been addressed by other researchers, however, and you can usually find patches that do something similar to what you want on the mailing list, which is generally quite responsive. Ben -- ben@bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/ "God does not play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein