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 exclusive 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 involves 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.