To: Mike Barker Cc: vkumar@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU Subject: Re: An Idea On Long Jobs In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 27 Jan 1997 15:45:09 EST." <199701272045.UAA14249@megara.MIT.EDU> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 16:13:02 EST From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" Hello Mike - I really appreciate your giving some thought to a pet project of mine. What you suggest certainly has its merits, but my main concern is that it does not scale. Also, what happens if someone signs up for N hours, and after that time the job is within a few minutes of completion? Does the job get bumped? Does the next person in line just wait? What happens if one's turn comes up at 3 AM? Is there queuing software that starts the job at that time, or does one have to get out of bed, traipse to a cluster, remotely log in to the machine in question and start it up? And what if a user finishes early at 3 AM? Does the administrator get beeped? Maybe a small group of us can get together and toss some ideas around to see if some of my objections can be answered. Thanks again for giving some time and thought to this. We all know that it will eventually again rear its head, and we shouldn't stop thinking about how to solve this problem. Naomi