[HTCondor-users] STARTER_SCRATCH_DIR_VARS proposal

["Anderson, Stuart B." <sba@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a proposal for STARTER_SCRATCH_DIR_VARS following the idea of STARTER_NUM_THREADS_ENV_VARS [1].

The initial motivation is better support for compiled Matlab jobs by adding MCR_CACHE_ROOT to the default value, or making it easy for site admins to add that specifically for their local pool. However, I can easily imagine there are other software packages that would benefit from having an application specific environment variable set to the a job's local scratch/sandbox space. In particular, this would hopefully help get rid of evil wrapper scripts like,

executable = matlab_wrapper.sh

#!/bin/sh
#
# MATLAB MCR wrapper script
#
exec /bin/env MCR_CACHE_ROOT=$_CONDOR_SCRATCH_DIR real_executable $@


Thanks.


[1] https://htcondor.readthedocs.io/en/v10_0/admin-manual/configuration-macros.html#STARTER_NUM_THREADS_ENV_VARS


--
Stuart Anderson
sba@xxxxxxxxxxx