Nathan's Questions on Schedulers

[Jonathan Clark]

OK, with a couple of changes to pbs.tape I was able to get it running
in our scheduler. At this point it would be nice to know more about
how execution proceeds. From what I gather, the ducttape command will
send jobs to the scheduler and monitor them; if I hit Ctrl+C, the
workflow execution fails (though the current jobs remain in the
scheduler) and the next time ducttape is invoked any of the incomplete
steps will be deleted. With long jobs, I should always run ducttape in
a screen so it is not terminated by the end of the login session. Is
that right?

REPLY:

Yes on all counts:
1) Ducttape sends jobs to the scheduler and monitors them
2) The current implementation does not delete jobs from the *PBS*
scheduler when you mash Ctrl+C (SGE jobs will get killed with the
current SGE implementation)
3) Incomplete steps can usually be detected and automatically re-run
as long as they gave a non-zero exit code and/or didn't produce all of
the required output files
4) With long jobs, you will want to run ducttape from screen.