Monday 10 May 2010

A job a day keeps the user at bay

There's always one isn't there? A pesky user who wants to try something fancy on a cluster but isn't entirely sure how to do it. This is the coal face of HPC. It might not have the glamour of procurement, or the technical challenge of system administration, but being able to help a stuck user is possibly the most rewarding part of the job.
I like to set myself a challenge every now and then (job a day? well, maybe not quite that often) to submit a job with crazy parameters, or oddball resource requirements. You never know when a user will want to do something similar, and then a) you'll be able to help, and b) you'll look pretty smart ;)
Thinking more about this I might fire in a blog post every now and than containing an interesting job submission technique, might be interesting to see if anyone can come up with any nifty alternatives...

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