Re: [Condor-users] Windows jobs behave deifferently under Condor

[Todd Tannenbaum <tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:57 PM 8/22/2006, Michael Jinks wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:02:51PM +1000, Philip Crawford wrote:
> >
> > 1. Is SPSSWIN.EXE going to create a Window, even a minimised one? Condor
> > won't allow an application to run which creates a GUI window.
>
> Yep, it does flash the SPSS worksheet on the screen briefly as it runs.
> Guess that's our answer then.

Actually, Condor *will* run apps that create a GUI window.  You just 
need to be certain that the application is batch-ready, i.e. that it 
will not pop open a window and then sit and block for some 
non-existent interactive user to click a button.  [ you could use 
Winbatch or a similar tool to help out here as well ... ].

Sometimes GUI apps are more sensitive to environment variables and 
such then their non-GUI counterparts, so you may want to use 
"getenv=TRUE" in your submit file.

> But, if that's the case, what's the story with the "use_visible_desktop"
> setting on Windows?

By default, Condor will setup a separate non-visible workstation and 
desktop for GUI apps to use.  If
  use_visible_desktop=true
in condor_config, then Condor will let the job pop open a window on 
the default visible (console) desktop.  This is almost certainly not 
what you want esp for non-dedicated workstations, but can be very 
handy for debugging a problem.

Something I sometimes do to debug a job running in Condor on Win32 is
  a) change my executable in my submit file to be cmd.exe
  b) change use_visible_desktop=true in my condor_config
and then submit.  After a couple moments a command window pops up on 
my screen with the same "environment" that Condor would use to run 
the job, so I try running my job interactively from the prompt to see 
if there are any obvious problems.


regards,
Todd


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Todd Tannenbaum                       University of Wisconsin-Madison
Condor Project Research               Department of Computer Sciences
tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx                  1210 W. Dayton St. Rm #4257
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~tannenba      Madison, WI 53706-1685
Phone: (608) 263-7132  FAX: (608) 262-9777