PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES WITH TORQUE META-SCHEDULING IN THE CZECH NATIONAL GRID

Abstract

The Czech National Grid Infrastructure went through a complex transition in
the last year. The production environment has been switched from a commercial
batch system PBSPro, which was replaced by an open source alternative Torque
batch system.
This paper concentrates on two aspects of this transition. First, we will present
our practical experience with Torque being used as a production ready batch
system. Our modified version of Torque, with all the necessary PBSPro ex-
clusive features re-implemented and further extended with new features like
cloud-like behaviour, was deployed across the entire production environment,
covering the entire Czech Republic for almost a full year.
In the second part, we will present our work on meta-scheduling. This in-
volves our work on distributed architecture and cloud-grid convergence. The
distributed architecture was designed to overcome the limitations of a central
server setup, which was originally used and presented stability and performance
issues. While this paper does not discuss the inclusion of cloud interfaces into
grids, it does present the dynamic infrastructure, which is a requirement for
sharing the grid infrastructure between a batch system and a cloud gateway.
We are also inviting everyone to try out our fork of the Torque batch system,
which is now publicly available.