Re: [HTCondor-users] Cycle scavenging with VMs (was: Help on FLOCK and CCB)

[Ben Cotton <ben.cotton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 2:01 AM, Batsayan Das <batsayan.das@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> The user will get a virtual machine, which have some computation capacity, in addition it ( the virtual machine ) can send jobs to pool A or B of idle desktops/laptops.  Both the virtual machine and pools will be created from idle desktop/laptops.
>
> Do you think this is kind of infrastructure is already is in place?
>
So this sounds a lot like another project I worked on in my Purdue
days. We had a test project where we would launch HTCondor VM universe
jobs. The VMs themselves ran HTCondor. The reason we did this was
because we had a lot of idle capacity on Windows machines and almost
no Windows-based jobs. The VMs ran Linux and so converted the Windows
machines into useful resources for us. We stopped working on it
because we had enough idle capacity from our dedicated Linux servers
that it wasn't necessary to harvest the Windows cycles. Not everyone
is that fortunate.

Anyway, my colleagues and I wrote an extended abstract and presented a
poster at a conference a few years ago (links below). It's a little
light on actual implementation steps, but it might give you an idea of
where to start. I'd suggest not having the VMs submit jobs, since you
don't particularly want your schedd to disappear unexpectedly and for
extended periods of time.

The basic architecture we used was to have a dedicated collector for
the VM pool. The VMs would connect to the central manager with CCB
(because the VMs were on a NAT interface) and the existing schedulers
would flock to that central manager.

There may be better ways, but that's how we did it. Hope this helps!

[abstract] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bcotton/papers/cca11-condor_vm.pdf
[poster] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bcotton/papers/cca11_poster.pdf


Thanks,
BC

-- 
Ben Cotton
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Cycle Computing
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