Using and Administering

The starter Process

The startd daemon spawns a starter process after the schedd daemon tells the startd to start a job. The starter process manages all the processes associated with a job step. The starter process is responsible for running the job and reporting status back to startd.

The starter process performs these functions:

• Processes the prolog and epilog programs as defined by the JOB_PROLOG and JOB_EPILOG keywords in the configuration file. The job will not run if the prolog program exits with a return code other than zero.
• Handles authentication. This includes:
  • Authenticates AFS, if necessary
  • Verifies that the submitting user is not root
  • Verifies that the submitting user has access to the appropriate directories in the local file system.
• Runs the job by forking a child process that runs with the user id and all groups of the submitting user. The starter child creates a new process group of which it is the process group leader, and executes the user's program or a shell. The starter parent is responsible for detecting the termination of the starter child. LoadLeveler does not monitor the children of the parent.
• Responds to vacate and suspend orders from the startd.
• Periodically generates a new checkpoint file, provided checkpointing has been enabled, and sends it to the scheduling machine.