[Condor-users] MPI jobs in the vanilla universe

["David E. Konerding" <dekonerding@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I am interested in running an MPI job on my cluster (which is already 
running Condor 6.6.6), but within the vanilla
universe (there are some restrictions to the MPI universe setup which we 
cannot abide by).

In the past, I've used Sun Grid Engine and PBS; I submitted a job asking 
for "N nodes"; the batch queueing system would basically wait until N 
nodes were free.  When the job ran, the batch system would start my job 
on the "first" machine of the N, and provide me with a file listing all 
the nodes ($PBS_NODEFILE is an env var pointing to the file).  At that 
point, I could run mpirun with the machines file being the list of 
nodes.  The batch system would properly manage the nodes, in that they 
would be marked as being used, rather than schedule more jobs there.

I've checked the manual, and there doesn't seem to be an equivalent in 
condor that I can find.  The 'machine_count' directive nt he condor job 
file doesn't seem to apply to vanilla jobs, and there are no other ways 
I can find to schedule a bunch of machines together.

Any suggestions.  Suggestions including obscure class ad hackery are 
quite welcome.

Dave