UNICORE jobs are organized as a directed acyclic graph, consisting of sub-jobs and tasks:
Each UNICORE job starts with a primary job, which is submitted to the top level Vsite.
A job may contain other sub-jobs or tasks.
All tasks
belonging to one (sub-)job run on the same Virtual Site (Vsite) in
the same temporary dedicated Job Directory (Uspace).
Sub-jobs may run on a different Vsite!
To prepare a new job you have to select New Job from the File menu.
All nested sub-jobs and tasks will be added by selecting the appropriate entry from the Job Preparation menu. The following tasks are available in the standard distribution:
Script Task (plugin)
Command Task (plugin)
Compile Task (plugin)
Additional plugins for the applications CPMD, Fluent, Nastran, Star CD and Gaussian are also available.
Once you have added a job and selected it by clicking with the left mouse button, the client will lookup the available UNICORE Sites (Usites) and display the possible selections in the main panel:
You can then select one of the Usites by clicking on the list entry. The client will now contact the UNICORE gateway responsible for that Usite and fetch a list of available Vsites. If not yet finished during start-up (in a background thread) the update may take a while depending on your network connection. Afterwards a list of Vsites will show up where you again have to select one entry. The UNICORE Client will now contact the Network Job Supervisor (NJS) for that Vsite and fetch the available resources if not already available from the start-up procedure.
Pressing the Refresh button
while having selected Job Monitoring in the Job Monitoring panel will
issue an update request for all Usites and Vsites.
When you load a previouly saved job, the client will also contact the Usite and Vsite specified in the job.
Each UNICORE site imposes certain resource limitations on the
tasks. They reflect more or less the capabilities of the batch
queuing systems on the target systems.To view all available resources
of a Vsite select the information button
in the Virtual Site panel.
The
resource information is separated into four groups:
Software resources: Application software which is available to all UNICORE users.
Capacities
Number of nodes
Main memory
CPU time
Number of processors per node (SMP systems)
Storages: The storage sub panel contains resource requests for the amount of storage needed on the different file system subspaces, e.g.:
Home (e.g. $HOME)
Root (e.g. "/"),
Job directory ( (Uspace)
Performance: measure in MegaFlops
For the numeric values the resources specifiy minimum, maximun, and default values. The latter are used if the user does not impose specific resource requests in the resource editor.
At start-up the Client contacts automatically the known Vsites to gather the latest information about available resources. The results are stored in the local cache file $HOME/.unicore/$USER/resourceCache.bin. The cache information is used when preparing jobs in offline mode or if a site cannot be connected because of network problems. The cached resource limits provide the best known estimates for the actual values which can be used as basis for the job preparation.
The following information may be entered in the fields of the Special Settings panel which is a sub-panel of the Job Group panel:
Define your email address (if not specified already in the User Defaults).
The batch sub system on the computing resource may use this to acknowledge the start and end of your job.
Set a Login and Project (group) if appropriate for the selected Vsite. The typical UNICORE user will ignore these fields since the user certificate sent with a job is automatically mapped to a corresponding user Login and a Project on the Vsite. However, if a site maps a certificate to different Logins and Projects e.g. for reasons of accounting, a mapping may be specified in the fields.