Re: [Condor-users] Stata and Stata/MP on Condor

[Dan Bongert <dbongert@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:26:57 +0000
Ian Cottam <ian.cottam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A potential user has asked me about running Stata over Condor on our 
> pool (or a new one).
> 
> 1. Does Stata need to be installed on all the nodes (the way other 
> packages are handled)?

We currently have Stata installed on all our our Condor nodes (we have
a network license for it), but we also have a HAS_STATA variable
defined on each node, and a wrapper script called condor_stata
constructs a submission that requires that variable. (It doesn't
really matter for Stata since it's on all the nodes, but we also do
something similar with SAS, which is only on a couple of our nodes.)

> 2. There is a Stata/MP (multiprocessing): how does such interact with 
> Condor?

Fairly well, actually. Last year we bought 10 dual CPU machines, and
set them up with 4 dual-cpu VMs with Stata/MP and 12 single-cpu VMs (6
machines) with regular Stata. Earlier this year, we accidentally
upgraded the main Stata binary to be Stata/MP for all of them, and was
pleasantly surprised by how nicely it behaved on the single-CPU
machines. If there was only one job on a single-CPU VM, Stata/MP
felt (rightly) it could multiprocess across both CPUs -- the CPU
assigned to it by Condor, as well as the CPU that Condor thought was
idle. If another job was matched to the idle CPU, Stata/MP became less
aggressive about grabbing the other CPU -- it seems to be pretty well
written.

Of course, these are all dedicated nodes, and we've turned off
preemption completely, so I could see how either of those could
complicate matters.

> 3. Anything else I need to know about?
> 
> 
> Thanks for any help with this!
> regards
> -Ian
> 
> 


-- 
Dan Bongert                     dbongert@xxxxxxxxxxxx
SSCC Unix System Administrator  (608) 262-9857

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature