>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Pittman <[email protected]> writes:
Daniel> Thanks. With the number of recommendations I will definitely Daniel> take a closer look at the facilities and cost of LSF ? though Daniel> I fear that our budget won't go that far, so a "free" starting Daniel> point will be the solution. Heh, I won't call them recommendations myself. But we just moved from LSF to RTDA's Network Computing (NC) load sharing tool. They also do batch scheduling, but we haven't gone quite that far. We're an engineering firm and it's only engineers who use it. Basically, while LSF is stable, and works well and has decent docs and commands, it's bloody expensive, esp when you never upgrade since it just works for what you're doing. So from a purely cost savings point of view, RTDA won for us. And they're very responsive and great to work with. A young and small company, and some thing are rough around the edges, but we've managed to get our engineers to move across without too much complaining. The big issue we run into is conving engineers to NOT camp out on compute nodes (slaves in NC parlance) with interactive shells or xterms from which they do their batch-like jobs. It just totally screws with system utilization... Daniel> Thank you; I appreciate the offer. At this stage it looks Daniel> likely that Condor will be the tool of choice, and I will be Daniel> looking to deploy a small trial cluster in the near future. Daniel> At least this new environment adds variety and spice to the job. ;) I'd also look at SGE as well, since you can download it and use it for free without support if you like, and then move to the supported version if you feel you need it, or if management wants to have the peace of mind. We evaluated both RTDA and SGE and NC won for a couple of reasons, though it's wasn't a complete slam dunk by any means. John _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
