[Beowulf] Do these SGE features exist in Torque?

[Glen Beane]

On May 9, 2008, at 2:26 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> At a previous job, I installed SGE for our cluster. At my current job
> Torque is the queuing system of choice. I'm very familar with SGE, but
> only have a cursory knowledge of Torque (installed it for evaluation,
> and that's it). We're about to purchase a new cluster. I'd have to  
> make
> a good argument for using SGE over Torque. I was wondering if the
> following SGE features exist in Torque:
>
> 1. Interactive shells managed by queuing system

yes,  qsub -I gives you an interactive shell


> 2. Counting licenses in use (done using a contributed shell script  
> in SGE)

this can be done by Maui or Moab.   All but the sites with the most  
basic needs will swap out the basic FIFO scheduler that comes with  
TORQUE for one of these more advanced scheduelrs


> 3. Separation of roles between submit hosts, execution hosts, and
> administration hosts

You can configure which hosts are allowed to issue admin commands to  
torque, same with submitting jobs.  Execution hosts are any host  
running the pbs_mom daemon

> 4. Certificate-based security.

no.  torque does have a kerberos authentication branch branch

>
> Are there any notable features available in Torque that aren't  
> available
> in SGE?

I'm not very familiar with SGE, so I can't answer this.  I know  
TORQUE USED to be much better than SGE at controlling MPI type jobs.   
If you use a PBS/TORQUE aware MPI job launcher it is pretty much  
impossible for any of the job processes to escape control of the  
batch system.  Last time I used SGE, I found the MPI support much  
less sophisticated than TORQUE, but this was several years ago.


-Glen, A TORQUE Developer

--
Glen L. Beane
Software Engineer
The Jackson Laboratory
Phone (207) 288-6153