Second Evaluation of Job Queuing/Scheduling Software

Abstract

The recent proliferation of high performance workstations and the increased reliability of parallel systems have illustrated the need for robust job management systems to support parallel applications. To address this issue, NAS compiled a requirements checklist for job queuing/scheduling software. Next, NAS evaluated the leading job management system (JMS) software packages against the checklist. A year has now elapsed since the first comparison was published, and NAS has repeated the evaluation. This report describes this second evaluation, and presents the results of Phase 1: Capabilities versus Requirements. We show that JMS support for running parallel applications on clusters of workstations and parallel systems is still lacking, however, definite progress has been made by the vendors to correct the deficiencies. This report is supplemented by a WWW interface to the data collected, to aid other sites in extracting the evaluation information on specific requirements of interest.