Re: [Condor-users] Recommending OS for new cluster

[Ian Chesal <ICHESAL@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Alex,

> We are starting to process some big jobs and the current condor dedicated
> cluster is not able to process those jobs correctly; the end results are
> not what they expect, some guy (including myself) in my organization think
> is related to memory limitations.  When you run those same jobs on local
> systems that have up to 4 GB of RAM they ran fine but on condor they ran
> but some of the results are not correct.

You can confirm your suspicion: install Condor on one of your desktop machines. Set it to advertise just one slot and only run "test" jobs. Submit your test jobs and compare the results of your job run under Condor, targeting this machine, versus run outside of Condor directly on the machine.

It could be RAM. It could be the OS variant that's causing the difference. Desktops are not likely running Windows *Server*, right? We run XP Desktop on our blades here specifically to ensure we're testing and measuring our software under the same OS variant our customers use.

It could also be processor architecture. A combination of compiler optimizations and different generations of x86 technologies can produce bad results.

Without knowing precisely what your software is doing, and how it's built, it's hard to say more. Or help with the server recommendation I'm afraid.

- Ian

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