[Swift-user] Looking for the cause of failure

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sat, 2010-01-30 at 23:07 -0500, Andriy Fedorov wrote:

> > You may also want to set the max time of the coster job (in seconds) to, for example:
> >
> >  <profile namespace="globus" key="maxtime">7500</profile>
> >
> > Change "7500" to whatever makes sense for your application. This is somewhat manual, but I suggest setting the time to some value that ensure that the PBS jobs last long enough for your application jobs. That aspect may need  further adjustment.
> >
> 
> I am not sure about this one. The documentation says maxtime defines
> the maximum walltime for a coaster block, and is by default unlimited.
> It seems to me that setting this parameter could actually create
> problems. Can you explain?
> 

What may happen is that the block (the actual PBS job submitted to run
the workers) is longer than what the queue allows.

For example, you may select the "short" queue, and that may have a limit
of, say, 2 hours for the walltime. You want to set the maxtime
accordingly in order to prevent coasters from submitting a job with a
walltime higher than what the queue allows, which would cause the job to
fail immediately.
Even in the case you don't explicitly specify a queue, the default queue
may itself have a limit.