On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, Marc A. Volovic wrote: > Guy Teverovsky wrote: > > >[Guy] One of my biggest concerns is the ease of use. Reading the Oscar's > >documentation I noticed that the job submission/distribution process is > >far from being intuitive. What I have is a bunch of researchers who are > >very smart at what they do, but most of them will scold me if the job > >submission involves some interaction with additional tools. Using > >pvm/mpi in Oscar (at least according to the docs) would require some > >manual fiddling on the user side. With *Mosix the process is much more > >user friendly. > > > > > If ease of use is such a concern, pretty anything is going to be a > hassle for your researchers. A reasonable compromise would be a batch > system (i.e. NQS, DQS, OpenPBS) - which is what I suggest in this case.
The admin (or somebody else) can prepare the standard hassle in advance, and combine it in a script which users will use, without understanding. What I did is prepare a makefile for distributing batch jobs using various batch systems (actually, there are two there - my own simple one, and openPBS). I call it a "parametric runs" makefile. It expects the researcher to create an input which is a template, for example, instead of a=4, have him/her insert [EMAIL PROTECTED]@, along the lines of a configure.in. Then the researcher creeates a file called PARAMETERS, where (s)he inserts values or groups of values for the parameters. For example: a: 1,2,3,4 b:1 There are some makefile parameters which they can tweak in the makefile, the major is what group of computers they are sending to. In your case, it will be one group, no need to tweak. Then they just hit make. There are more targets, like analizing the results or sending only jobs which have failed or which have not started yet (that one overrides the openPBS bug) If there is an interest, I can check if I can release this as free software. Orna. -- Orna Agmon http://ladypine.org/ http://haifux.org/~ladypine/ ICQ: 348759096 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
