Parasol job control system

Introduction

The parasol job control system is used to manage a multiple CPU/core compute cluster. It can also be used on a single computer that has multiple CPUs/cores.

It is the cluster control system expected by the U.C. Santa Cruz Genomics Institute genomics toolsets and processing pipelines such as building new genome browsers, computing lastz/chain/net pair-wise alignments, multiple alignments of genome assemblies, and many other bioinformatics processing toolsets.

Computer organization

One computer (or one CPU of one computer) is allocated to the task of managing the compute jobs. This is referred to as the parasol hub machine.

The other computers in the cluster are allocated to the task of running the compute jobs. These computers are referred to as the parasol node machines.

Compute jobs to the system are managed with parasol commands on the hub machine. The compute jobs are assigned to the node machines by the parasol processes running on the hub machine.

A single machine can be used as both the hub controller and as a node task machine as long as two CPU cores are reserved, one for the operating system and one for the hub processes, with the extra CPU cores allocated to the node task resource pool.