PBSPro

Introduction

PBSPro or Portable Batch System Professional is a distributed workload management software that provides a unified batch queuing and job management interface to a set of computing resources. PBS is responsible for resource management, job scheduling, supercomputer optimization,
message passing programming, parallel computation and distributed high performance computing.

PBS Professional provides many features and benefits to both the computer system user and to the organization.

Enterprise-wide Resource Sharing provides transparent job scheduling on any PBS system by any authorized user. Jobs can be submitted from any client system both local and remote, crossing domains where needed.

Multiple User Interfaces provides a graphical user interface in addition to standard command line interface, for submitting batch and interactive jobs; querying job, queue, and system status; and monitoring job progress.

Parallel Job Support works with parallel programming libraries such as MPI, PVM and

HPF. Applications can be scheduled to run within a single multi-processor computer or across multiple systems.

Job-Interdependency enables the user to define a wide range of inter-dependencies between jobs. Such dependencies include execution order, and execution conditioned on the success or failure of another specific job (or set of jobs).

System Monitoring includes a graphical user interface for system monitoring. Displays node status, job placement, and resource utilization information for both stand-alone systems and clusters.

Computational Grid Support provides an enabling technology for meta-computing and computational grids, including support for the Globus Grid Toolkit.

Automatic Load-Leveling provides numerous ways to distribute the workload across a cluster of machines, based on hardware configuration, resource availability, keyboard activity, and local scheduling policy.

Distributed Clustering allows users to utilize physically distributed systems and clusters, even across wide-area networks.

How PBSPro Works
PBS consists of two major components: System processes and Commands.

Commands: PBSPro supplies both command line programs and a graphical interface. These are used to submit, monitor, modify, and delete jobs. There are three command classifications: user commands, which any authorized user can use, operator commands, and manager (or administrator) commands which require administrative privileges.

Server: The server process is the central component for PBSPro. The server’s main job is to provide the basic batch services such as receiving/creating a batch job, modifying the job, protecting the job against system crashes, and running the job. Typically there is one server managingm a given set of resources.

Job Executor(MOM): This process actually places the job into execution. It is called MOM as it is Mother of all executing jobs.MOM places a job into execution when it receives a copy of the job from a server. MOM also has the responsibility fo returning the job’s output to the user when directed to do so by the server.one MOM runs on each computer which will execute the PBS jobs.

Scheduler: The scheduler implements policy controlling when each job is run and on which resources. The Scheduler communicates with the various MOMs to query the state of system resources and with the Server to learn about the availability of jobsto execute.

Vendor: Altair Engineering

SERC has PBSPro configured on three SGI altix HPC machines namely altix, altix350-1, altix350-2 , on a cluster consisting of 22 nodes composed of 8 HP xeon and 14 Sun opteron dual core machines, on three nodes – Tesla Cluster and on four nodes – Dell Cluster .

The following is the configuration information of PBSPro on these systems.

<!–1. Cluster consisting of HP Xeon and SUN Opteron machines : Linux cluster–!>

1.Tesla Cluster

2.Dell Cluster