[Beowulf] doubt about job queuing systems

[Jin, Yao]

Thanks for your valable advice. I read them carefully and had  a
face-to-face talk with CST , they admitted that current application is a
beta release, they promise to provide official parallel version before
Nov,2009...damn it..

It is really important to make deep investigation before buying commercial
software.

Thanks!

Best Regards,
Jin, Yao


On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Chris Dagdigian <dag at sonsorol.org> wrote:

>
> 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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