Hi Ralph,
On 12-Jul-09, at 4:07 AM, Ralph Castain wrote:
Assuming that Scoreboard is appropriately licensed (i.e., is not
licensed under GPL, but preferably something like FreeBSD), and that
it has an accessible API, then we can link against it when in that
environment and interact any way we desire - including asking
Scoreboard for its recommended list of nodes.
The info I have is all from http://www.macresearch.org/node/4654.
To use scoreboard you pass a run-time argument to the xgrid command
using "-art" and "-artid".
xgrid -job submit -art scorescript.pl -artid score MyJob
The script can return any score calculated from any of the machine
attributes, i.e. you can send the job to machines with more than 2 Gb
of memory, or that are faster than 2GHz. So its a pretty nice
feature. I don't think there is any way to manually query the nodes.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it is possible to do this via the API
which does not look to have any hooks into Scorecard:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/XgridDeveloper/index.html#/
/apple_ref/doc/framework/XgridFoundation_reference
Curiously, looking at the API, I further get the impression it has no
concept of identifying the nodes. The xgrid controller assigns them,
and there does not seem to be a mechanism for the user to choose. So
until the API is improved to account for the Scoreboard capability I
guess this can't be accessed via openMPI.
Thanks a lot for thinking about this. As I said, I have a solution
now that works just great, so this is all just for curiousity's sake
at this point.
Cheers, Jody