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Chapter 1

Configuring Hosts and Clusters

This chapter provides background information about configuring various aspects of the grid engine system. This chapter includes instructions for the following tasks:

About Hosts and Daemons

Grid engine system hosts are classified into four groups, depending on which daemons are running on the system and on how the hosts are registered at sge_qmaster.

  • Master host. The master host is central for the overall cluster activity. The master host runs the master daemon sge_qmaster. sge_qmaster controls all grid engine system components such as queues and jobs. It also maintains tables about the status of the components, about user access permissions and the like. The master host usually runs the scheduler sge_schedd. The master host requires no further configuration other than that performed by the installation procedure.

    For information about how to initially set up the master host, see "How to Install the Master Host" in N1 Grid Engine 6 Installation Guide. For information about how to configure dynamic changes to the master host, see Configuring Shadow Master Hosts.

  • Execution hosts. Execution hosts are nodes that have permission to run jobs. Therefore they host queue instances, and they run the execution daemon sge_execd. An execution host is initially set up by the installation procedure, as described in "How to Install Execution Hosts" in N1 Grid Engine 6 Installation Guide.

  • Administration hosts. Permission can be given to hosts other than the master host to carry out any kind of administrative activity. Administrative hosts are set up with the following command:

    qconf -ah hostname

    See the qconf(1) man page for details.

  • Submit hosts. Submit hosts allow for submitting and controlling batch jobs only. In particular, a user who is logged into a submit host can use qsub to submit jobs, can use qstat to control the job status, or can run the graphical user interface QMON. Submit hosts are set up using the following command:

    qconf -as hostname

    See the qconf(1) man page for details.


Note - A host can belong to more than one class. The master host is by default an administration host and a submit host.


Changing the Master Host

Because the spooling database cannot be located on an NFS-mounted file system, the following procedure requires that the Berkeley DB RPC server be used for spooling.

If you configure spooling to a local file system, you must transfer the spooling database to a local file system on the new sge_qmaster host.

To change the master host, do the following:

  1. On the current master host, stop the master daemon and the scheduler daemon by typing the following command:

    qconf -ks -km

  2. Edit the sge-root/cell/common/act_qmaster file according to the following guidelines:

    1. In the act_qmaster file, replace the current host name with the new master host's name.

      This name should be the same as the name returned by the gethostname utility. To get that name, type the following command on the new master host:

      sge-root/utilbin/$ARCH/gethostname

    2. Replace the old name in the act_qmaster file with the name returned by the gethostname utility.

  3. On the new master host, run the following script:

    sge-root/cell/common/sge5

    This starts up sge_qmaster and sge_schedd on the new master host.

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