Using and Administering

Working with Machines

Throughout this book, the terms workstation, machine, and node refer to the machines in your cluster. See Machines and Workstations for information on the roles these machines can play.

You can perform the following types of tasks related to machines:

• Display machine status: when you submit a job to a machine, the status of the machine automatically appears in the Machines window on the GUI. This window displays machine related information such as the names of the machines running jobs, as well as the machine's architecture and operating system. For detailed information on one or more machines in the cluster, you can use the Details option on the Actions pull-down menu. This will provide you with a detailed report that includes information such as the machine's state and amount of installed memory.

  For an example of displaying machine status, see Step 8: Display the Status of a Machine.

• Display central manager: the LoadLeveler administrator designates one of the machines in the LoadLeveler cluster as the central manager. When jobs are submitted to any machine, the central manager is notified and decides where to schedule the jobs. In addition, it keeps track of the status of machines in the cluster and jobs in the system by communicating with each machine. LoadLeveler uses this information to make the scheduling decisions and to respond to queries.

  Usually, the system administrator is more concerned about the location of the central manager than the typical end user but you may also want to determine its location. One reason why you might want to locate the central manager is if you want to browse some configuration files that are stored on the same machine as the central manager.

• Display public scheduling machines: public scheduling machines are machines that participate in the scheduling of LoadLeveler jobs on behalf of users at submit-only machines and users at other workstations that are not running the schedd daemon. You can find out the names of all these machines in the cluster.

  Submit-only machines allow machines that are not part of the LoadLeveler cluster to submit jobs to the cluster for processing.