In article <3A1130D8.2E8522B6 at biol.rug.nl>,
Aldert Zomer <zomeral at biol.rug.nl> wrote:
>>Did you just contact the people at platform computing, and they provided
>a solution for you? It's rather interesting to use the processing power
>of the desktop computers also, we have quite a lot of desktop machines
>here which are only used for email, wordprocessing etc.
By desktop machines, I mean desktop UNIX/Linux workstations. LSF does
support NT, but I have no experience of that. It even supports mixed
Unix/NT clusters, but I imagine that's quite a headache to get working.
It's hard enough on a mixed UNIX network like I have here
(solaris/Linux)
I first came across LSF about five years ago, when I was running the
University of Cambridge bioinformatics facility. I needed a job
queueing and management program, since the standard UNIX batch program
just wasn't cutting it. I looked into NQS, and various other NQS-like
programs. A colleague at the department of Engineering recommended LSF
to me, and I got a trial licence from Platform for a month. I was
suitably impressed and bought it. I have since implemented it on two
other networks, with widely varying work needs, and it's done admirably
with almost everything I've thrown at it.
I currently use it to distribute jobs between a Sun E3000 and seven
dual-processor Linux boxes. The Linux boxes run things transparently;
the users only ever log into the Sun machine.
Tim.
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