Re: [Condor-users] condor and Darwin-Intel

[Erik Paulson <epaulson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 06:32:22PM +0100, Alan wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I downloaded condor for Mac OSX PPC and it was great to see it runs in
> my Mac Intel via Rosetta.
> However, there's only the "vanilla" version.
> 
> My scenario is as follow:
> 
> I am developing an application which relies only on Linux Intel
> processors. The submitting machine should be any computer. Indeed, our
> server, a Sun-sparc Solaris, can submit the jobs (which binaries are
> Linux Intel) without problem (universe environment). However, from my
> Mac I got this error (as expected though):-( :
> 
> Submitting job(s)
> ERROR: You are trying to submit a "standard" job to Condor.
> This version of Condor only supports "vanilla" jobs, which
> perform no checkpointing or remote system calls.  See the
> Condor manual for details (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual).
> 
> My question is why Solaris has a universal version and Mac not?
> And how to overcome this? If possible, of course.
> 

It's not possible to overcome at present. The code that a submit machine
needs to understand how to process a remote system call is sort of
wrapped up in the platform-specific code of what an execute machine needs
to be able to make a remote system call. 

The remote system calls can be translated across platforms, ie a Linux
execute machine can make a remote system call, and a Solaris submit machine
can translate that into something reasonable to execute on the Solaris
machine (Condor doesn't handle every system call, only the mostly-POSIX
ones) 

In principle, any Condor submit machine could support processing
remote system calls. Condor just doesn't do that because it's a pretty
uncommon setup and it would take a fair amount of time to write the
code to do it. 

As a solution that works today, you can use Condor-C to submit jobs from
any platform, and have those jobs be routed to a Solaris or Linux
machine that can then submit a standard universe job.

-Erik