Re: [Condor-users] Cycle stealing (WAS: Attributes disappearing from input piped to the job fetch hook)

[Ian Chesal <ICHESAL@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Do many people here use condor in a combination of both
> designated machines and cycle reclamation mode?

Well, you know I do. :) At least up until this year I did. My new system, based around Hooks, is not working on our desktops yet. That's an early 2010 project for me. And it likely won't use Condor to do the on/off decisions. I'll probably just have my hook script sleep if the time is during the day, not on the weekend, kind of thing. Way easier than managing that crazy START expression. :)

> The amount of hassles we had from trying this meant I avoided
> it like the plague, I found that the more homogenous I can
> make the environment the easier it is to deal with a larger farm.

Hassles? Aside from a really complicated Condor config file what'd you run in to? Our desktops are all pretty uniform in our Engineering department here. We get the occassional rogue job or overburdened desktop causing trouble. But when those crop up we just take that desktop out of the pool pretty much permanently. They desktop side of the pool is just there for a little boost in throughput. We don't get a lot of jobs on them, but it's enough to make some users a little happier. You have to know your job profile to use them: all your jobs have to complete in 8 hours or less or they'll be getting killed every morning when the policy flips to daytime mode!

> I might revisit this one our desktops move to 64bit but I doubt it.

We treat the desktops in the pool with a pretty laissez-faire attitude. If the desktop machines are running jobs okay: great. If not: take them out of the pool, don't even try to figure out what went wrong. Low effort. And it works pretty well.

- Ian

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