Running on the Altix (Newton)

Development Work

In order to facilitate code development work on Newton, there is a development queue which is not subject to the same scheduling system as the normal queues. Development jobs may be submitted to the ndev queue by use of the -q option to bsub.

Important points about the development queue are:

• Jobs must have no more than 16 processors.
• Jobs must run for no more than 30 minutes wall clock time.
• The queue is only guaranteed to be available in core hours.
• Core hours are Monday to Friday between 8.30 a.m. and 6.00 p.m., except for any periods of scheduled down-time. Jobs are run on a first come first served basis apart from where jobs which require a small numbers of processors may be run at the same time as other jobs which require a small number of processors.

The development queue is designed primarily for code development work which either requires fast turnaround time or has a need for an interactive capability for debugging which requires the use of a small number of processors during core hours. The queue may also be useful for people who are about to submit a large job using a complicated batch script, and who wish to check that the script will allow a small version of their job to run for a a few minutes before they submit the large job - it may be the case that a large job has to wait for over a day for the machine to be drained, and a job which fails within a few seconds wastes time and resource for all users of the system.

Example

An example of a script for a totalview debugging session of an MPI job using the development queue would be:

Jobs are submitted to the development queue in the same way as normal batch jobs using bsub at the command line
bsub < scriptname