2.4 Road-map for running jobs with Condor

The road to effectively using Condor is short one. The basics are quickly and easily learned. Unlike some other network-cluster solutions, Condor typically does not require you to make any changes to your program, even to do more advanced tasks such as process checkpoint and migration.

Using Condor can be broken down into the following steps:

Job Preparation.

First, you will need to prepare your job for Condor. This involves preparing it to run as a background batch job, deciding which Condor runtime environment (or Universe) to use, and possibly relinking your program with the Condor library via the condor_compile command.

Submit to Condor.

Next, you'll submit your program to Condor via the condor_submit command. With condor_submit you'll tell Condor information about the run, such as what executable to run, what filenames to use for keyboard and screen (stdin and stdout) data, and where to send email when the job completes. You can also tell Condor how many times to run a program; many users may want to run the same program multiple times with multiple different data files. Finally, you'll also describe to Condor what type of machine you want to run your program.

Condor Runs the Job.

Once submitted, you'll monitor your job's progress via the condor_q and condor_status commands, and/or possibly modify the order in which Condor will run your jobs with condor_prio. If desired, Condor can even inform you every time your job is checkpointed and/or migrated to a different machine.

Job Completion.

When your program completes, Condor will tell you (via email if preferred) the exit status of your program and how much CPU and wall clock time the program used. You can remove a job from the queue prematurely with condor_rm.