How to Manage Many Jobs

Introduction

Often, you may need to run many nearly identical jobs. There are different approaches to achieve this goal with minimal effort and some of the approaches will be described below. Which approach best suits your needs depends on the nature of your problem but some hints are given for making the choice.

In the examples below, a simple program to decide whether a number is a prime will be used. The example program can found [media:ManyTasks.tgz here] and in order to use it, you can download it and then

$ tar -zxvf ManyTasks.tgz             # to unpack
$ cd ManyTasks                        # go to directory
$ make                                # build executable

After that, you can run the program, e.g. with

$ ./isprime 73
yes

to see if a number, in this case 73, is a prime (yes it is). The idea of the example is to run isprime on every number in parameter.dat. Therefore, if we want to run this as a job we can think of it as having many jobs that are identical except for one parameter. A single job can also be called a task in this context.