Fwd: Re: [torqueusers] Materials Studio and wallclock time

[Chris Samuel]

Oops - working from home today and sent this previously from wrong email 
address.. doh!

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [torqueusers] Materials Studio and wallclock time
Date: Wednesday 08 February 2006 09:27
From: Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org>
To: torqueusers at supercluster.org

On Wednesday 08 February 2006 06:49, Steven A. DuChene wrote:
> Discovered the hard way that Materials Studio has a default wall clock
> time for jobs it is running through a queuing system.

Argh, this must be new in 4.0.  (BTW: didn't get a chance to look at that
 code you sent yesterday, will check tomorrow when I'm back in the office).

> There is no way
> for a user submiting a MS job to request a different wall clock time on
> a per job basis according to the information supplied by the Accelrys
> support folks. I requested that they make some change to their system
> that WOULD allow a user coming in from their GUI to request different
> values for wall clock time on a per job basis. As it is right now they are
> teling me I have to bump up the value hard coded into one of their setup
> scripts which will make every MS job run with an artificially large wall
> clock time. ARGH!

My solution to the previous version (which didn't specify a walltime at all)
was to create multiple queues called things like run_1_hour, run_12_hours,
run_1_day, etc, each of which allocated a different default walltime to the
job and then the Materials Studio victims could select a queue to get a
walltime on their job.

So you could do this and then hack their Perl scripts to not set a walltime
 in the first place.

> Their response was that while they filed this as an enhancement request
> that they don't actually implement enhancement requests like this unless
> they see the need or similar request from a number of customers.

Unfortunately I've yet to receive the 4.0 package from our MS users (and I
don't even know if they've got it yet) but when I do I'll certainly bug them
about it.

> I find this sort of response frustrating but I thought I would pass it
> along since I know there are other folks here using Materials Studio with
> clusters managed with torque/maui/moab.

Sadly it's what we've come to expect from this package. :-(

Chris
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 Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC

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 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
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