Description

Scientists run their applications on high-performance computers and generate a large number of data files. The data need to be processed in order to extract meaningful scientific results. In general, the manipulation of output files consists of executing a series of independent serial tasks on single processors on the same platform where the initial data were produced. This can take a significant amount of time and leads to an inefficient use of available resources.

The Portable Distributed Scripts (PoDS) is an open source Python application that allows users to execute serial independent tasks concurrently across nodes on multicore clusters. The package consists of a set of scripts working together through a simple text-based interface. A user only needs to provide minimal information to perform the desired tasks.

PoDS does not require any knowledge of the individual tasks and does not make any assumptions about the underlying application. As a matter of fact, the tasks to be executed can be from different applications. PoDS can be seen as a task parallelism tool where concurrent independent jobs are executed in parallel.

PoDS consists of a front-end Python script through which a user provides a list of tasks to be performed. In a practical sense, PoDS determines the list of nodes reserved by the user and connects (through a password-less ssh command) to individual nodes to distribute the workload (independent tasks). As long as tasks are available, each node receives as many of them as it has cores (if the user chooses to employ all the cores within the node). PoDS internally monitors the progress of each task and moves to the next available one as soon as one is completed. At any given time, all the nodes (in fact all the processors) remain busy until there is no more work to do.

Here are additional features of PoDS:

• Throughout the execution of the tasks, a logger file is created to monitor internal operations. This can be useful for debugging.
• PoDS produces a report on timing statistics that can be useful to determine how the individual tasks were distributed to the available processors, and how they can be properly balanced in future runs.

PoDS is actively maintained and can easily be modified to meet users’ needs as they emerge

To use PoDS on NCCS computers, visit the webpage: PoDS.