14.3 Conclusions

14.3 Conclusions

Workload management is all about utilizing cluster resources according to a supplied policy. The five activies of workload management—queueing, scheduling, monitoring, resource manangement, and accounting—interact to produce the system usage results desired by the site.

The next few chapters of this book discuss in detail two complete workload management systems (Condor and PBS) and the Maui job scheduler. Details of using the features of each system are provided in the specific chapters. In addition to the systems discussed in this book, there are several others that are popular with Beowulf clusters. One that has recently become popular is the Sun Grid Engine (SGE) wwws.sun.com/software/gridware/sge.html. Another system that contains aspects of a workload management system is Scyld, discussed in Chapter 18.