[Beowulf] Re: doubt about job queuing systems

[Peter St. John]

Regarding:

"...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..." [Jin Yao]

There used to be two reasons for running commands through a non-graphical
shell; one was that GUI was not yet available. The other is that programs
talk to each other through 1 dimensional streams, not 2D visual layouts. One
reason has long since gone away, but the other still holds. Vendors of
pretty GUI interfaces forget the latter, they aren't programmers.

Integrating the GUI with the OS arguably benefits end-users but is
misterable for programmers; contrast remote administration of an NT server
with PCAnywhere (pushing bits of the GUI through phone lines) vs X
server/client, in the 90's. Really made MSWin a nutty choice for servers
(but that's my soapbox, sorry).

Peter


On 4/20/09, Heiner Grill <H.Grill at science-computing.de> wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
>
>
> do you know that there is an open source, entry level version of LSF
> available named Lava from
>
> http://www.hpccommunity.org/index.php?pageid=lava
>
> This might be helpful if you want to test without buying LSF licenses.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> Heiner
>
>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 4
>> Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:07:48 +0800
>> From: "Jin, Yao" <jinyao at ymail.com>
>> Subject: [Beowulf] doubt about job queuing systems
>> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
>> Message-ID:
>>        <7036b08f0904170607r2ec69ba4t56f9347773fba6cb at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> We've just bought a program named  CST <http://www.cst.de> 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.
>>
>> 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.)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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 <http://www.feko.info> 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...
>>
>> Are they telling the truth, or just lying?
>>
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Jin, Yao
>>
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