Scheduling jobs and allocating resources on a Beowulf cluster quickly becomes a challenge once more than a few users start running codes on the system. Manual coordination of runs is tedious, particularly when different codes have very different resource requirements. A job queuing and scheduling facility solves these problems by automatically executing jobs as resources become available ensuring optimal utilization of the cluster. Moreover, a good job scheduler can be configured to enforce operational policies about when and where jobs belonging to different users may be run.
Scheduling jobs and allocating resources on a Beowulf cluster quickly becomes a challenge once more than a few users start running codes on the system. Manual coordination of runs is tedious, particularly when different codes have very different resource requirements. A job queuing and scheduling facility solves these problems by automatically executing jobs as resources become available ensuring optimal utilization of the cluster. Moreover, a good job scheduler can be configured to enforce operational policies about when and where jobs belonging to different users may be run.
Last month’s column introduced batch queues and job scheduling for Beowulf clusters. We installed and configured OpenPBS (http://www.openpbs.org/), and created a sample parallel program and execution script for the job queuing system. We also created a single execution queue, and ran jobs using the default OpenPBS scheduler, fifo. Contrary to what its name implies, fifo can do much than simple first-in first-out scheduling.
As mentioned last month, fifo is just one of many available schedulers. Third party schedulers with more capabilities can also be used with OpenPBS. One particularly popular scheduler is Maui (http://www.supercluster.org). This month’s column focuses on installing and using Maui.
Maui is an advanced batch scheduler designed for high performance computing platforms. As such, it makes decisions about where, when, and how to run jobs based on specified policies, priorities, and system limits. Maui provides extensive administrative control over system resources, handles job reservations, and offers detailed logging support and powerful tracking tools for management…
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