Condor Job Guidelines

The following are guidelines we use for developing jobs for Condor.

Requirements

1. Jobs must not edit files outside of the condor working directory or operating system temp directories.
2. Jobs must upload and setup all prerequisite software as part of the job. There is no way for Condor to check whether software has been installed on a particular node, and lists of machines gets out of date.
3. Jobs are allowed to edit registry entries, but they should not interfere with installed products.
4. Jobs that listen on a TCP or UDP port that is accessible by a host other than the Condor server must undergo a security review by ITG.

Tips

1. Jobs should specify files by relative path. This way the files are kept in the condor working directory (which differs by machine).
2. Jobs which send over 50MB of data to the nodes should consider file compression. zip is the easiest to implement.
3. If your job does not react well to interruptions, I recommend setting a job requirement that it only be executed between 6pm and 6am. Keep in mind that the machines in the CRC rooms (stc-046, stc-006) do get rebooted once a night between 2 and 3am. If this is not acceptable, the Linux and Mac OS X machines tend to have longer uptimes.
4. If you need to upload a lot of data to the job server to dish out to the clients, consider using rsync.