[Condor-users] XP submit, Linux manage, submit & exe, and MATLAB

[Trevor Roose <tlroose@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It seems that the archives don't have much to say about MATLAB on 
Condor, and as I have finally figured out how to get my setup to work, I 
thought I would provide what insight I gained to help out others.

I am running Condor 6.7.2
My setup involves a linux cluster running Suse 9.1.  One of the nodes in 
the cluster is the condor manager.  All of the nodes can submit and 
execute.  I also have submit nodes running XP.  I have a NFS partition 
on the cluster which is accesible from the XP machines via Samba.

I was interested in running MATLAB -- nothing more, nothing less.

For Suse 9.1, the Fedore Core 1 dynamic tarball works.  It probably 
doesn't matter which you use, but this one works for certain.

To setup the config files, read the documentation and the archives, that 
is already addressed there.

To get MATLAB to work, you cannot submit the MATLAB binary, especially 
if you are running an XP submit host.

See http://icsil1www.epfl.ch/doc/cluster/condor_matlab_tutorial.
This page explains nearly all you need to know to run MATLAB using a 
*NIX submit host.  I only make one change, which should be common to 
both *NIX and XP platforms.

Instead of using 'GetEnv = True', as the author suggests,
use 'Env = HOME=/home/condor'
Note: This is why the author recommended using 'GenEnv = True', as this 
transferred over the HOME environment variable for him.  However, this 
obviously would not work on a XP submit machine and is overkill, as 
MATLAB only needs HOME defined.

If you don't create a condor user as the documentation recommends, then 
specify some user and that should work as well.  If the HOME environment 
variable is not set when MATLAB runs, then MATLAB will core dump when a 
job is submitted from a XP host, my guess is that it will do the same 
from a Linux host, but I don't recall.

Hope that helps,
Trevor