patas.ling.washington.edu Condor Cluster

What is it?

Condor is a batch-oriented clustering system. Jobs are submitted into a job queue, matched with an available compute node, and run on that node.

How do I get an account?

If you do not yet have a Computational Linguistics account, fill out our online account request form. You must have a valid UW NetID.

How do I access patas?

Open an SSH connection to patas.ling.washington.edu port 22. See HowToAccessPatas for more information.

How do I use Condor to run my jobs?

Visit the HowToUseCondor Wiki page for a quick introduction. You may also want to view the PDF presentation I wrote for orientation.

Software notes

• TroubleshootingCondor - Troubleshooting Condor job problems.
• PatasFileSystems - Overview of shared filesystems in the cluster.
• PatasShebangLines - Script headers for installed interpreters.
• XmingGotchas - Problems with running Emacs (and some other apps) using the Windows X server Xming

Differences between patas and pongo

This section documents differences between the software loaded on patas and the software loaded on pongo.

• The base operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5, instead of Debian Stable.
• We are running a 64-bit operating system, with compatibility libraries to support 32-bit software.
• The 64-bit version of Sun's Java Virtual Machine is installed. This provides nearly 4 gigabytes of heap space, instead of 2 gigabytes in the 32-bit version. This is also a server JVM, meaning it performs some extra optimization. This results in slower startup times but long-running jobs complete faster.
• To encourage efficient use of the cluster, as well as to make sure the system stays responsive, long-running jobs on patas itself will automatically have their CPU priority lowered. Jobs submitted to Condor are immune from this and always run at full priority.

Linguistics software

A listing of linguistics software on Patas can be found in the CompLing database.

Patas? What's that?

Patas monkeys (pronounced "pä təs" or "pə tä", depending on which dictionary you believe) are slender, ground-dwelling primates found in central Africa. They can run faster than any other primate, reaching speeds of up to 55 km/hr.

-- brodbd - 07 Jul 2008