Metronome Beyond the B

1
Metronome Beyond the BT Lab

• Todd L Miller
• UW-Madison

2
Talk Questions

• Why go anywhere else?
• Move jobs or resources?
• Whats Red Hat in Swiss?

3
Why go anywhere else?

• UWs flagship BT Lab
• Fifty live and supported platforms
• Three submit nodes
• Friendly, brilliant (and modest!) support staff
• ETICS has its own platforms.
• TeraGrid has its own platforms and many more
  execute machines.

4
Move jobs or resources?

• Condor Glide-ins
• Temporarily and dynamically claim resources.
• Pre-production success with TeraGrid.
• Job Migration
• Sends a copy of a job to the remote resource.
• Used with ETICS.
• Extra support in Metronome.

5
Metronome and Glide-Ins

• Good news transparent to Metronome.
• Bad news
• requires difficult Condor-level changes
• difficult to automate glide-in setup?
• difficult to automate glide-in dispatch (WIP)
• What about prereqs?

6
Metronome Job Migration

• Good news
• easy configuration
• easy automation
• solid mechanism
• Bad news
• requires Metronome- or job- level changes
• policy tricky

7
Whats Red Hat in Swiss?

• Different sites call similar platforms or
  software different names.
• Forcing everyone to use our names doesnt make
  anyone happy.
• Solution let everyone use their own names, but
  still interoperate.

8
Platform Namespaces

• New feature in Metronome 2.5.0
• Let you use your own, existing names in addition
  to the defaults
• Which improves interoperability with other sites
  which also have their own, existing platform
  names.

9
Platform Namespace Syntax

• Use ltplatform-typegtltplatform-namegt anywhere you
  could use a bare platform name.
• nmix86_rhap_5
• eticsrhel5_ia32_gcc412
• Default platform_type in submit file.
• Default PLATFORM_TYPE in nmi.conf.

10
a work in progress

• Multiple platform types work in a single pool,
  and for cross-type parallel jobs.
• However, the current job migration mechanism only
  advertises the NMI platform.

11
Prereq Namespaces

• Presently, two types of prereqs
• BT Lab style has prereqs
• SoftEnv prereqs
• Different types used differently, so you cant
  add a namespace on the fly.

12
Install-on-Demand

• Database-driven dynamic prereq install.
• Originally for Java version sweeps.
• Could make glide-in prereqs transparent
• SoftEnv shim
• Site-specific build/install?
• Complications with job migration.

13
Talk Answers

• Our focus is on using remote resources to make
  new platforms available.
• Were working to make both of the complementary
  approaches work.
• Im told its Red Hat, but well believe
  whatever you say.

14
Your Questions?

• Ill be available for more in-depth questions
  this afternoon, during the tutorial session.