[Bioperl-l] Parasol

[Jim Kent]

Dear People -

I'd like to announce the availability of a new free
job scheduling system for computer clusters.  We
developed it at UCSC to manage our 1000 machine
Linux cluster.   It should be quite portable to other
operating systems too.   The system is called Parasol.
Documentation can be found at:
    http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~donnak/eng/parasol.htm
Linux executables are at 
    http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/exe/linux/
in parasol.zip.   The source is currently in the middle
of quite a large bunch of genomics related source at
    http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/src
at some point we'll put the Parasol sources into a more 
self-contained unit and publish an article on it.

Though most of my stuff requires a license for
commercial users,  Parasol, at least this version,
is free for all.  

Parasol is intended for dedicated computer clusters.
It has no logic like many of the other schedulers do
to see if something other than it's own jobs are going
on in the compute nodes.   This simplifies it quite
a bit, and is also one of the reasons it can deal out
jobs at the rate of about 500 per second,  which is the
sort of speed you need for the larger clusters.

I hope people find it useful.  It's certainly made running
jobs on our cluster a lot easier than it was under
Condor or Codine.   (LFS was too expensive for us
to try out).

Jim Kent  
Genome Bioinformatics Group
University of California at Santa Cruz
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/