[Beowulf] scheduler recommendations for a HPC cluster

[Jesse Becker]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 03:22:14PM -0400, Rahul Nabar wrote:
>Any strong / weak recommendations for / against schedulers? For a long

I'm a happy SGE user, and have been for 7+ years.

A basic install does simple FIFO queuing (just like Torque, from what
I've heard).  It is fairly easy to add various "fairness" mechanisms to
make sure that a single user doesn't take over the cluster, as well as
define what you thing "fair" means.

SGE can handle both interactive and non-interactive jobs, manage basic job
dependencies, and has a more advanced interface through the DRMAA API.
SGE also provides resource management and load balancing (e.g. handling
software licenses and making sure compute nodes aren't oversubscribed).
There's a wealth of documentation, a very helpful mailing list, 
active development, and responsive developers.

Oh, and it's free (as in beer and speech), although I think you can
throw money at Sun for support if you want.


-- 
Jesse Becker
NHGRI Linux support (Digicon Contractor)