bernhold@red8 (David E. Bernholdt) (06/18/91)
In article <1991Jun16.174703.18419@ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: >I wonder how it compares with MDQS? My personal opinions... We used MDQS here for some time before we got NQS. My perception as maintainer and user of it on our system is that it was primarily designed to support printer queuing on a very inhomogeneous network, with a fair variety of different output devices. The batch support is very basic and seems to have been almost an afterthought. As provided by BRL, the batch server has no concept of resources limits and does not deal very well with cases where the user wants to abort a running job -- we generally found that you had to signal the process to kill it rather than using the appropriate MDQS commands to manipulate the queues. Network clients are provided, but as we never used them, I can't remark on them. On the other hand, the documentation is very good and the program seems well structured. Anyone with the inclination and time should be able to turn MDQS into something functionally equavalent to the modern NQS as used by Cray, etc. Since the MDQS documentation lists an email address for questions to the BRL support staff (without promising any real support, of course), I asked if they'd be interested in having an improved batch server if someone ever got around to working on it. They basically said no, they didn't need such a time, and wouldn't support it for their users. We're now running NQS as available from COSMIC. It seems much more appropriate to being a batch queueing system. Since I'm not the one who brought it up, I can't comment on the code or documentation. I do know that it took a little porting (MDQS went up almost immediately). It would be much nicer to have all the capabilities that Cray and others have added, but even the COSMIC version offers resource limits, etc. to be configured for whatever machines support them. -- David Bernholdt bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu Quantum Theory Project bernhold@ufpine.bitnet University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611 904/392 6365