[Condor-users] Condor and IDL

[Ángel de Vicente <angelv@xxxxxx>]

Hi,


in case this could be of interest to anyone...

at our place many people use IDL. Until now, our use of IDL with Condor 
was limited by the number of available licenses at any given time, until 
we discovered the IDL Virtual machine 
(http://www.creaso.com/english/12_swvis/11_idl/idlvm.htm)  which lets 
you run an IDL "executable" file without the need for licenses (see 
http://www.astro.umass.edu/~tangsk/documents/idl_html_help/distributing4.html#wp1010436 
for an example of how to create such a file).

The problem is that the IDL Virtual Machine is meant to be run 
interactively in a server with X running and Condor is not particularly 
well suited for this. But with a little ingenuity, we wrote a script 
(still in beta :-)) that uses Xvfb and Xautomation to submit condor jobs 
that will create a virtual X server, then automatically click the "Click 
to continue" button of the IDL virtual machine 
(http://www.creaso.com/english/12_swvis/11_idl/IDLVM_splash.jpg), and 
then do whatever the code is supposed to do. We have tested this, and so 
far it works quite well. There are some glitches with multicore machines 
and slow machines, but overall it works without any problems, and now we 
can submit hundreds of IDL jobs simultaneously to our Condor pool!

If anyone is interested, please let me know.

Cheers,
Ángel de Vicente

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| http://www.iac.es/galeria/angelv/           |
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| High Performance Computing Support PostDoc  |
| Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias        |
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