[Swift-devel] Falkon and Coaster support for MPI

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 13:24 -0500, Michael Wilde wrote:
> We mean MPI jobs launched from Swift onto BG/P, or directly to Falkon or 
> Coaster to BGP. But in general the desire is to run all work, even 
> workloads with no workflow dependencies, under Swift, for uniformity, 
> site independence, and provenance.
> 
> The initial discussion here was based on the assumption that a 
> Falkon-like mechanism was required in order to run workloads of many 
> small jobs on the BGP - whether that be through Swift, or directly. 
> (Small meaning 1 to 64 CPUs each and order of a few minutes of runtime 
> each).

We should probably make a separation here between the ability of the
system to run jobs (of whatever kind the system supports) and the
suitability of a certain type of jobs for this system.

In principle, there is a local Cobalt provider there, which should allow
running jobs on BG/P without the need for an indirect mechanism. Though
that may not be suitable for our typical problems.

> 
> I think that assumption is true on the Argonne BGP for two reasons: 1) 
> scheduling policy doesnt allow or favor any user from running > 2 BGP 
> jobs at once,

There is a big difference between "doesn't allow" and "doesn't favor".