Subject: Long Jobs history #1 Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 17:41:50 EDT From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" ------- Forwarded Message Received: from SOUTH-STATION-ANNEX.MIT.EDU by po6.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA02978; Wed, 28 Jun 95 16:27:21 EDT Received: from MOZART.MIT.EDU by MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA24967; Wed, 28 Jun 95 16:27:13 EDT Received: by mozart.MIT.EDU (5.57/4.7) id AA13393; Wed, 28 Jun 95 16:27:12 -0400 Message-Id: <9506282027.AA13393@mozart.MIT.EDU> To: carla@MIT.EDU, matt@MIT.EDU, tom@MIT.EDU Cc: ellis@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU, gjackson@MIT.EDU Subject: 6/28 Long Jobs mtg Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 16:27:12 EDT From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" At today's meeting to discuss a facility for running Long Jobs in the Athena environment, we came up with: - a list of user requirements - a list of our own issues - a list of next steps User requirements: - ----------------- 1. Some courses require students to run long jobs, leading them to tie up workstations. 2. Ditto people doing theses (both graduate and undergraduates) 3. Ditto UROP students 4. Ditto some researchers 5. The types of jobs include data analysis, simulation, and rendering 6. Software includes C, FORTRAN, Matlab, Abacus, ProEngineer, Adina, Aspen 7. In some cases, CPU, memory, and disk needs are large Our issues: - ---------- 1. Authentication of the user to the service 2. Athentication of the service on the user's behalf 3. Integrity checking to make sure that the workstations aren't hacked 4. Shielding users from each other's jobs 5. Don't want people to use this service as an extra dialup machine by telnetting to it 6. It needs to be manageable in our environment, without lots of hand tending 7. Who gets to use the service? 8. How critical is the service? What if it goes down? 9. Ease of use for the end user 10. What platform? It should be compatible with our standard Athena platforms so that people can debug at ordinary workstations 11. What impact does this service have, if any, on dialup service? Next steps: - ---------- 1. Invite Steve Ellis in to talk about Load Balancer software 2. Look at hardware options, especially Sun 3. What do we need to do here that we do on the dialup servers as far as security and integrity checking? 4. We need to decide on policy issues 5. How much horsepower do we need? 6. We need to start up this service in a controlled way so as to get the bugs out and manage expectations ------- End of Forwarded Message