MIT Information Systems    Longjobs
Please Note:
The Longjobs service has been discontinued as of May 31, 2006.
Requests for new accounts are no longer being processed.
Athena Owl    On this page: System Status | Contents | About Longjobs | Register / Manage Subscriptions | Using the Service | Help/Contacts
PLEASE NOTE: Due to low usage levels the longjobs service has been deactivated as of May 31, 2006.

(For information on past events, see the service status archive. For general network status, see http://nic.mit.edu/3down)

Contents

About Longjobs

The purpose of the Longjobs service is to give users the ability to run non-interactive, unattended jobs which serve a legitimate academic need but conflict with the Athena Rules of Use about leaving cluster workstations unattended.

Characteristics of the service:

Longjobs Subscriptions

To use Longjobs, users must be subscribed to the service. A subscription is defined by a username, a longjobs "subscription group", and an end date. Most longjobs subscriptions will fall into one of seven predefined categories:

Usage categoryLongjobs subscription group
Undergraduate - thesis long-uthesis
Undergraduate - UROP long-urop
Undergraduate - other long-umisc
Graduate - thesis long-gthesis
Graduate - other long-gmisc
Staff long-staff
Class long-<courseno>


A user can have more than one subscription. For instance, an undergraduate might be subscribed to the long-urop longjobs group with a quota of 60 hours and an end date of March 15 and at the same time be subscribed to a class group (e.g. long-12.001) with a quota of 40 hours and an end date of May 31. At any time, longjobs subscribers can use subscription modification forms to request that their quota be increased, that their end date be moved back, or that the subscription be cancelled.
We ask that subscribers be as accurate as possible when estimating the number of hours they will need to complete their jobs, as there is a finite number of machine hours available.
Access to longjobs is provided for academic use.
Longjobs is not currently available for sponsored research use.

Registration and Subscription Management Forms

Using the Service

To run a job you will first create a job script, and then submit it to a queue, from which it will be dispatched to an execution server. The longjobs program and others associated with the service are located in the longjobs locker, and may be run from any Athena machine running a supported Athena release. Once you have submitted your job, you may log off or continue with other tasks (the service manages renewal of tickets and tokens as needed for the job); you will be notified of job status by zephyr and/or email, and output will be saved to your Athena directory as explained in the documentation below. The following documentation is available:

Help and Further Information

We will post any status messages at the top of this page; please check this first if you are encountering problems. If you need assistance, contact Athena Consulting, providing as much information as possible about what comands you were using, any error messages you received, Job ID, etc.

Information about the Longjobs project can be found in the Project Notebook
Longjobs Documentation: Overview (this page) | Job Scripts | Running Jobs | Checking Job Status | Quick Reference and FAQ

Last modified: Thu Jun 1 18:28:37 EDT 2006