On Apr 17, 2009, at 9:07 AM, Jin, Yao wrote:
Dear all,
We've just bought a program named CST Microwave Studio 2009(CST MWS)
Engineer from CST says their program could be scheduled by Platform
LSF. Our cluster is built with Rockscluster, only torque or SGE is
avaiable. We cannot affort LSF as it is too expensive.
Engineer from Dell(vendor of our cluster) says torque, SGE and LSF
have just the same functionality, what makes difference is
stability, schedule algorithm and price.
The differences are mainly in capability, cost and internal
architecture. For the purposes of just running an MPI application you
could treat them as roughly similar
We don't have LSF in hand, and engineer from CST refuses to
demostrate running CST MWS with LSF.(They says they don't have LSF
either, the test is carried on other customer's cluster.)
The vendor should expect to document "howtos" or best practice
whitepapers if they expect to sell their code onto clusters. If the
are releasing a MPI application to the market then it is insane that
they don't already know this.
CST MWS is traditionally a program run on a single PC. Version 2009
is the first release with MPI parallell code. It uses a modified MPI
Library.
If you run the code successfully on your rocks cluster without SGE or
LSF then you should be able to take the final step of integrating it
into the cluster scheduler. You may have to do this yourself but there
is no special magic required. Both LSF and SGE handle graphical X11
applications without much problem.
Even console execution would start GUI interface. If no X server is
found, it would redirect graphical output to Xvfb(a virtual X11
server that performs all graphical operations in memory)
When I argue that many other computational electromagnetics programs
such as FEKO can run in batch mode without any X output and can be
sheduled directly by external job queueing system, engineer from CST
declares that kind of program not starting a GUI is old-fashioned...
The engineer is clueless and is talking from a single-workstation GUI
world. Nobody who computes at significant automated or batch scale
would even consider a GUI for most applications (except to manage
workflow).
Are they telling the truth, or just lying?
I suspect they just have not made the proper transition from their
single workstation model to the MPI/cluster world yet. You may be one
of their first customers for this.
You have a few options:
- Test the code on your ROCKS cluster with an MPI install without SGE
or LSF. If the product works and is something you need then consider
integrating it into SGE on your own. Generally not a huge problem if
you have a decent SGE admin
- Ask on internet forums for other customers who use this product.
There is a good chance that others are already running this on a
cluster and can share their tips with you
- Ask the vendor for a discount or free software licenses if you offer
to publish the methods by which you integrated the code with ROCKS/SGE
- Tell the vendor that if they are serious about selling an MPI
application into a cluster world they will have to get their head
around the fact that GUIs are bad and the product must be entirely
scriptable
my $.02 of course
-Chris
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