Introduction:
Why NetBatch? At my workplace, we have way more computing needs for the number of machines we own. Hence, it would be economically infeasible to buy enough machines to satisfy our peak consumption, which is growing constantly. NetBatch is a tool, which allows our organization to maximize utilization of the available computing resources. This paper discusses about NetBatch and NBS, a package around NetBatch that handles job management, which use principles of queuing, job scheduling, sequencing to achieve its goals.
How does it work? Each person has a computer on his or her desk that is a source of computing power. When that person isn’t using that computer to do interactive work, it sits idle. With NetBatch, however, we can take advantage of those untapped hours of computing time. At night, whenever a person is absent from work or any time when a computer is not being used to some predefined utilization, NetBatch can run jobs there. Users who are in need of computing power submit “jobs” on such machines subject to a few restrictions. NetBatch queues the jobs and runs them when they are at the front of the queue and when an appropriate machine is available. This allows us to accommodate peak loads by distributing the demand across a large number of machines at all times. Typically, different projects are on different computing cycles, so one group may be in a slump when another is peaking and NetBatch provides a good solution for the needs of the entire design community in our organization. An overview of the job submission process is provided in Appendix A. This describes the flow of a typical job from the time a user has a need to perform a computing task to the time the job completes, or crashes.
NetBatch: Structure
NetBatch terminology: ...