Hacker News Reader

Comparing Norc to batch is similar to comparing it to cron. Many of the limitations of batch processing come with retrying or auditing complex trees of dependencies (bigger than a handful of tasks).

Condor has DAGMan (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/dagman/) for managing DAGs of jobs, and I suspect that it can scale higher than just a handful of tasks.

I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.

Condor acts as match maker for jobs and cluster nodes using "classified advertisements" (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/). Classads allow you to describe the jobs and the cluster nodes, and to express arbitrary requirements and preferences for both. This allows jobs to say "I need a node with X", but it also allows nodes to express requirements (e.g. "I won't any run jobs coming from the psych department"). I don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses.

However, Condor appears to be very complex. The PDF version of the Condor 7.3 manual has 991 pages in it. OTOH, Red Hat MRG Grid is based on Condor (http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/), so commercial support should be available.

View on HN