Re: [Condor-users] excel on condor

[Ben Burnett <burnett@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>
thanks for all your efforts on this. we run a couple of large scheduling
sims that use excel and vba. because of the random nature of the application
we need to do multiple iterations of the datasets. that is why we thought
and still think that condor could be an answer to our problems. going
through this drill I found out some interesting things about excel macro
security settings. the macro security settings are not part of the workbook
but part of the individual machines registry settings. if you set the
workbooks macro to low, (so you will not get the "enable macro" popup), save
it and then share across the network, the workbook will default to the
security settings of the machine that is looking at it, not what you set in
the workbook. to get around this I had to set a new variable in the all the
machine's registry of the cluster. when excel first starts up, it looks at
the excel security settings that set are in the registry and sets that for
the workbook. 
<<<<

In the future, this could be run as a separate condor job.  If you can find
which registry entries Excel modifies in the machine's hive, then you could
write a script to just set them to the correct values.  This job would only
need to be run when new machines are added to the pool.

>>>>
but with that said... it still did not work. I almost think it is the way
that arguments are passed to excel. to run excel from the command line you
would type... excel.exe "c:\sdk2.xls", the argument here "c:\sdk2.xls" is
actually the workbook and not a simple value. when condor starts a remote
job does it know that the excel argument is a workbook and probably has to
be copy over to be worked upon?
<<<<

As I believe another user commented, it is possible to tell Condor to
transfer input files.  When I responded to you I simply assumed you were
running these tests on a single test execute node, which had sdk2.xls in the
root of the C: drive.  In general, however, you want to do as the other user
suggested: you can use the "transfer_input_files = file1,file2,..." to
transfer the input files to the execute node.  For more info, see:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v6.8/2_5Submitting_Job.html#SECTION0035
4000000000000000

And if you do it this way, you won't have to tell your executable/script
where to find the input file, it will be transferred to the temporary
execute directory on the execute machine; that is, you won't need to say
C:\my\file\is\here\bla.xls, it will be in the current working directory.

I'm going to quickly few options here, and I'll let you know what comes of
it.

-B

-----Original Message-----
From: condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ben Burnett
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 16:19
To: 'Condor-Users Mail List'
Subject: Re: [Condor-users] excel on condor

Hi Jeff:

I've got some bad news, and some good news:  

I've apparently misled you.  A colleague of mine has informed me that Excel
actually requires access to the current user's registry (although this may
have changed).  The problem with this is that Condor currently does not load
the user's profile (which includes the user's registry entries)-- even when
you tell it to run as a particular user.  We do this for efficiency reasons,
because some users may have huge profiles that take a long time to load.

You may be able to circumvent this problem by writing a batch file that
launches Excel using the "runas" command.  This, however, would require that
you have a common user on all the execute machines (to run as), and that you
supply a password to the "runas" command-- which has obvious security
implications.   

The good news, however, is that we will be adding the ability to load user
profiles to a future version of Condor.  

-B

-----Original Message-----
From: condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tkacheff GS14 Jeffrey
C
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 1:05 PM
To: Condor-Users Mail List
Subject: Re: [Condor-users] excel on condor

hi ben,
you got me further down the road with the submit file. it seems now what it
is doing is starting excel on the idle cpu, but it is not executing the
workbook. 

first I condor_submit the submit file, then I see what machine it grabbed
thru condor_status. I go over to that machine and bring up task manager, it
will show excel as one of the processes executing but it is not using any
cpu time. it looks like excel started but it is not executing the workbook.

we have the workbook set to start running once it is opened. I tried running
it from the command line and it worked just fine. I used c:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office\Office\excel.exe "c:\sdk2.xls".

any other suggestions?

thx
jeff



-----Original Message-----
From: condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ben Burnett
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 15:38
To: 'Condor-Users Mail List'
Subject: Re: [Condor-users] excel on condor

Hi Jeff:

 

Assuming you workbook app starts running when you open it, and that Excel is
installed on all the execute nodes, you should be able to use something akin
to the following:

 

universe = vanilla
executable = <enter your ms office path here>\excel.exe

arguments = C:\sdk2.xls

transfer_executable = false

error = c:\sdk2.err 

queue

 

What happened with your submission is that Condor does not know how to
execute Excel data files, it only handles executables and batch files.

 

-B

 

 

 

From: condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tkacheff GS14 Jeffrey
C
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:28 PM
To: condor-users@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Condor-users] excel on condor

 

et al, 

new user to condor. 

we have an excel workbook app that we would like to run multiple times on
our condor cluster as a test. if the test is successful then we will move
our bigger excel models over for multiple runs. 

this some things that I have tried. 

I noticed that I can start the workbook from the command prompt just by
entering the name at the command prompt. this will start the excel app
running. armed with this knowledge I built a "submit" file for the
condor_submit command that looks like this. 

universe = vanilla
executable = c:\sdk2.xls
error = c:\sdk2.err
queue 

when I run this file with condor_submit, the command runs with no errors, a
computer in the cluster is "claimed" and nothing happens. the app should
take about 15 minutes to execute, but is over in a couple of seconds. 

does anyone have any working knowledge of launching excel apps on condor? 

thx
jeff tkacheff 


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