What I'd LOVE to see in SGI's NQS...

[Jason Molenda]

I know a new release of NQS will be coming out from SGI some time (soon?)
and I would like to post my one humble recommendation that I would
kill to see implemented.

Any managers of NQS out there probably have grown to hate the qmgr
program.  It's a nifty program and all, but the ways you input things
for queues is (it seems to me at least) erratic.  I would kill for
a regularlized interface for specifying stuff for queues.  A format
that I've thought about a bit would be something like

---  start of format proposal-type deal ----

set queue <resource name> <queue> [queue,...] = <value> [value,...]

There is a good reason for each part of this specification.

The "resource name" could come after the list of queue(s), but I think
it would probably be easier to parse up front and when you get down to it,
it really doesn't matter.

The list of queues comes next.  Notice that because we are using an equal
sign to delimit the value from the queues we can have a list of queues
instead of only one queue at a time.  This assumes that "=" is not a
legal queue name.

The equals helps delimit the list of queues and the list of values.

The reason the values come last is because it might be a list of users
or groups to add to an access list.  Therefore it would be difficult to
determine the end of the list if it were earlier in the command without
some delimination that wasn't a legal user name.  End of Line isn't
a legal user name, so I figure that should be pretty unique. :)

------ end of format proposal


I don't know about other folks, but we are currently tuning our NQS
setup quite a bit... I'll get a message like "change the default nice
values on all the queues to 15" or somesuch thing and I have 14 queues
to change!  Yuck.  With the new format, I could simply say

set queue nice_value i1 i2 i3 i4 i5 i6 i7 m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 = 15

And *taa-daa* it would be done.

Wanna add a three new users to the access list of all the "m?" queues?

set queue user m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 = larry dick moe

Currently there seem to be a billion different formats needed for
each different kind of command and I don't see any good reason why
this is necessary.. if I'm missing something, please enlighten me.
This would make everyone's life easier, I would think.

One other thing before I go:  Would it be that hard to check the
userid in qstat to see if it is root running it to show them
the full description of the job running?  E.g. a user is running
something in queue 'm6'.  If I want to find out more information
about that job than just that it is running, I have to either
be that user or use qmgr as an 'Manager'.  Couldn't qstat check
t osee if a 'manager' (or at least root) was running it and
display the full information?  Or doesn't it _have_ the full
information?  i obviously don't know much about the internal details
of the program...
-- 
Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst
molenda at msi.umn.edu || "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish."