[Beowulf] Interactive vs batch, and schedulers

[Chris Samuel]

On 16/1/20 3:24 pm, Lux, Jim (US 337K) via Beowulf wrote:

> What I’m interested in is the idea of jobs that, if spread across many 
> nodes (dozens) can complete in seconds (<1 minute) providing essentially 
> “interactive” access, in the context of large jobs taking days to 
> complete.   It’s not clear to me that the current schedulers can 
> actually do this – rather, they allocate M of N nodes to a particular 
> job pulled out of a series of queues, and that job “owns” the nodes 
> until it completes.  Smaller jobs get run on (M-1) of the N nodes, and 
> presumably complete faster, so it works down through the queue quicker, 
> but ultimately, if you have a job that would take, say, 10 seconds on 
> 1000 nodes, it’s going to take 20 minutes on 10 nodes.

But doesn't that depend a lot on what the user asks for, or am I 
misunderstanding?

All the best,
Chris
-- 
  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Berkeley, CA, USA