W2H: How to activate the Batch-Queue-Feature in W2H

document, describing the now deprecated configuration until W2H 3.1

Peter Ernst and Martin Senger

This page describes, what you have to do, if you want to activate the Batch-Queue-Feature. This feature is deactivated by default.

What does Batch-Queue-Feature mean?
Until now, whenever you press the Run-Button in the Application-Window, the job was started immediately. Now you have the possibility to put this job into a batch queue.

After activating the Batch-Queue-Feature, you'll have a further selection of batch queues in the top row of the Application-Window, where the experienced users may select the appropriate queue. For the unexperienced users, you gave a default choice, which will be used, when the user doesn't modify the selection. You also have the possibility to force users to use a specific batch queue.

This Batch-Queue-Feature has to be activated for each application for which you want to use it.

But using this is only possible, if your system offers a queueing-system. Therefore this feature is partly system dependent and needs you to program two small scripts (must be located in the same directroy as w2h.com):

  1. w2h.batch.add: This program puts the jobs into the queue.
  2. w2h.batch.rm: This program removes a job out of a queue.
How to do those programs will be described later; within this package there are also 3 examples for the queueing programs qsub, batch and at. Select one which is appropriate to your queueing system, rename it to w2h.batch.add (and a corresponding one to w2h.batch.rm), put them into the same directory as w2h.com, and change their access rights to make them executables.

However, batch queues will only be used for those applications, for which you have modified the according .config-file.

There you have to specify at least a QUEUEDEFAULT.

But let's give you a step-by-step description:

  1. If you have a queueing system like 'qsub', you can offer your users quite a list of queues. You can specify a default list of queues for all applications, though it must be activated for each individual application. Or you can specify an individual list of queues for the individual applications. A special is the keyword none: This means the application is not started in a batch-queue. You can use it as a QUEUEDEFAULT, too. So you have two possibilities:

    The name of the queue will be passed to you by W2H in the w2h.batch.add-program.

  2. If you don't already have the QUEUES entry in the .config-file, of the application, in which you want to use batch queues, you have to specify at least a QUEUEDEFAULT into that applications .config, e.g:

    QUEUEDEFAULT short

    If you already have the QUEUES entry, the first item will be used as default queue.

  3. The w2h.batch.add-program has to do the following things:

    Please look into the provided examples for details:

  4. The w2h.batch.rm program is more simple. It gets the batch-job-ID from the w2h.batch.add program on its command-line, and it just has to remove this job from the queue

    There are examples, too, for this file:

  5. Finally, you have to activate QUEUES_ENABLED in Cfg.pl.


p.ernst@dkfz-heidelberg.de
Last modified: Thu Dec 2 17:53:49 1999