Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!crdgw1!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!ken
From: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: roll your own supercomputer
Message-ID: <43872@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jul 90 19:18:28 GMT
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: carey@cs.wisc.edu (Michael Carey)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, U. Wisconsin
Lines: 39

> From: carey@cs.wisc.edu (Michael Carey)
> To: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu
> Subject: RE: roll your own supercomputer
> Status: R

> Ken,

> I saw your note on the net.  Just FYI, there is actually a facility of
> that nature - not ISIS-based, but quite effective - available (at no charge
> for universities, I'm pretty sure) from the University of Wisconsin.  It's
> called Condor, and currently manages jobs for about 170 workstations (from
> Sun, DEC, IBM, and HP) here.  Folks in our dept who do simulation studies
> rely heavily on it as a way to get lots of CPU days in a short time;  folks
> who do things like explore large search spaces (e.g., to understand what the
> search space looks like for optimizing very large join queries) often run
> many-hour programs on it.  It does periodic checkpointing, and it hops off
> a workstation when the workstation's owner returns.  If you're interested
> in it, or know of folks who would be, it's supported here by Mike Litzkow
> (mike@cream.cs.edu);  he's one of the dept's research programmers.  There
> was a paper about it in the 8th ICDCS Conference (in 1988) about it called
> "Condor - A Hunter of Idle Workstations" (by Litzkow, Livny, and Mutka).

... I am aware of Condor, but I just in case other readers of this
group are interested I am posting this message.

My feeling is that Condor makes a lot of assumptions about why people
are trying to manage the resources in their machine and what it means
to schedule a task.  Although quite nice for the simulation work being
done at Wisconsin, many applications would have problems with IO performance
degradations factors of 2-3, and the Condor concept of job checkpointing
is also very specific to the type of jobs Wisconsin is running on the
system.  Also, I have the impression that Condor isn't very fault-tolerant,
but I could be out of touch with the most recent  release of this 
system.

I would be more interested in seeing a "resource management tool" 
on which more specific solutions such as Condor could be layered.

Anyhow, thanks for the pointer!