[MPICH] mpiexec -soft with Sun Grid Engine

[Yusong Wang]

Hi,

I am trying to take advantage of the "-soft" option on a busy cluster.
In the Appendix D (P362) of "Using MPI-2":
mpiexec -n 10 -soft 2:10 program
will run the program on various number of processes, depending on what
is available.

But this option doesn't work at all on our system, even though there are
enough nodes for the lower bound in the soft option. The version of
MPICH2 is: mpich2_mpd_sock v 1.78 2005/09/23

I read the python source code for mpiexec and tried:
mpiexec -n 10 -soft 2 program
It does not work either.

I wonder what is available for this option in the current distribution
of MPICH2. Also, should mpiexec talk to Sun Grid Engine periodically to
see if there is enough resource to run the job with the lower bound
number of CPUs after submission? Or just check the availability of CPUs
once at submission.

Thanks,

Yusong