[Clusterusers] NIMBYed nodes

[Chris Perry]

I have a different ideal solution to propose: use tractor!

What you are looking to do with your NIMBY mechanism is to pull machines out of tractor temporarily so they can run your job(s). But this is exactly what tractor does: it gives a job to an idle machine then keeps that machine from running new jobs until the first job is killed or completed. If you spool with high enough priority, tractor kills and respools a lower priority job so as to free up the machine, so you don’t have to wait if immediate access is a concern of yours.

Not to mention, the tractor interface will show running jobs so there would be a “Lee’s job” item in green on the list. This might help keep you less likely to lose track in the way you describe happening now.

Worth considering? I’m sure there are a few kinks to figure out (such as how to tag your jobs so that they have the full machine, guaranteed) but I feel confident that we can do this.
 
- chris

On Apr 20, 2015, at 2:31 PM, Lee Spector <lspector at hampshire.edu> wrote:

> 
> Some of these were probably my doing, but I only recall nimbying 1-4 and 4-5 in the recent past.
> 
> It's not a problem with a node that causes me to do this, it's an interest in having total control of a node for a compute-intensive multithreaded run, with no chance that any other processes will be allocated on it. Sometimes I'll start one of these, check in on it regularly for a while, and then check in less frequently if it's not doing anything really interesting but I'm not ready to kill it in case it might still do something good. Then sometimes I lose track. Right now I have nothing running, and any nimbying that I've done can be unnimbyed, although I'm not 100% sure what I may have left nimbyed.
> 
> Ideally, I guess, we'd have a nimby command that records who nimbyed and maybe periodically asks them if they still want it nimbyed. I'm not sure how difficult that would be. If somebody is inspired to do this, then it would also be nice if the command for numbying/unnimbying was more straightforward than the current one (which takes a 1 or a 0 as an argument, which is a little confusing), if it returned a value that made it more clear what the new status is, and if there was a simple way just to check the status (which maybe there is now? if so I don't know it).
> 
> -Lee
> 
> 
>> On Apr 20, 2015, at 1:36 PM, Wm. Josiah Erikson <wjerikson at hampshire.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>>   Why are nodes 1-17, 1-18, 1-2, 1-4, and 1-9 NIMBYed? If you are
>> having a problem with a node that causes you to need to NIMBY it, please
>> let me know, because maybe it just means I screwed up the service keys
>> or something. I'm not omniscient :)
>> 
>> -- 
>> Wm. Josiah Erikson
>> Assistant Director of IT, Infrastructure Group
>> System Administrator, School of CS
>> Hampshire College
>> Amherst, MA 01002
>> (413) 559-6091
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Clusterusers mailing list
>> Clusterusers at lists.hampshire.edu
>> https://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/clusterusers
> 
> --
> Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
> Director, Institute for Computational Intelligence
> Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
> 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
> lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
> Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438
> 
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