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Job Scheduler for Windows

Original question

From: Deb McCaffrey dmccaff4@asu.edu
Sent: Monday, December 4, 2023 3:25 PM
To: people-network@carcc.org
Subject: [CaRCC people] Scheduling on Windows?

Does anyone know of a way to do job scheduling on Windows? We have some researchers dealing with resource contention on their Windows server. They're just manually communicating their jobs right now.

Several options:

1: HTCondor

"HTCondor offers Windows functionality. You can find more information here: https://htcondor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/platform-specific/microsoft-windows.html" (Carrie Brown)

"If you've got any questions about HTCondor on Windows, feel free to reach out to htcondor-users@cs.wisc.edu. We'd love to hear feedback!" (Brian Lin, OSG)

2: HyperShell

"Actually we have something that may work. At Purdue we've developed a workflow automation tool for high-throughput computing called HyperShell (https://hyper-shell.readthedocs.io, https://github.com/glentner/hyper-shell). It's been in use for a few years now, is cross-platform, and has a few different modes of use. To use it as a persistent scheduler, it can have a local SQLite database file on the Windows server, or a remote Postgres instance, and it will schedule tasks on all connect executors. It is not a resource manager though, however many concurrent tasks you say can run - will, so the workload itself needs to be told not to use more than you intend. I've used this to orchestrate large numbers of tasks over dozens of Windows Server instances." (Geoffrey R Lentner glentner@purdue.edu)

Other places to look at:

A handy list of job scheduling software, and some such as Apache Airflow, are open source and run on Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software

It remains to be seen whether any other them have the features your researchers need. (David Paul Reddy)

Considerations for Windows jobs

"...it's good to get a sense of what sort of jobs researchers running on this Windows server.

  • Do they involve a GUI interface and interactive sessions?
  • Are they pleasantly parallel tasks with low core requirements or bigger multi-core OpenMP or MPI ones?
  • How long do the jobs normally last and how many is each individual trying to run?" (Matthew T. West, Research IT, University of Exeter)