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README : Generic NQS

Academic Computing Services , The University of Sheffield

Stuart Herbert (S.Herbert@sheffield.ac.uk)

Document copyright ©. All rights reserved.


Abstract

Under grant NTI/48.2 from the New Technologies Sub Committee (NTSC) of JISC, the University of Sheffield is maintaining a freely-available version of the Network Queueing System (NQS), the de facto standard batch processing system for the UNIX operating system.

This document is intended to be read first by anyone wishing to compile, install, and use Generic NQS. It provides general information about Generic NQS, and plenty of pointers to other sources of information.


Contents

Click here for a plain-text version of this paper. Click here for a copy of this document in Microsoft RTF format, suitable for printing (if available).


Quick Start


Getting Started

For full instructions on installing, and configuring Generic NQS, please see the `INSTALL' document, included with the Generic NQS source code. A HTML version is available from :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Product/GNQS/v3.4x/Install/
If you encounter any problems, please see the `PROBLEMS' and `PROBLEMS.old' documents, supplied with the source code - they contain full lists of known problems with Generic NQS, and solutions/work-arounds where available.

Finally, please read the rest of this README when you can spare the time. Even if you don't read anything else, please read the section on electronic mailing lists, and take the time to subscribe to them.

Best regards,

Stu


A Brief History Of NQS


About Generic NQS

Thank you for your interest in Generic NQS.

Generic NQS is the continuing development of Monsanto-NQS, itself descended directly from the original COSMIC NQS, written under contract to NASA by Sterling Software, Inc.

Generic NQS incorporates enhancements from Boeing, CERN, and a large number of individual contributors. Full details of contributions since October, 1994, can be found at :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Product/GNQS/v3.4x/Changes/
and at

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Product/Monsanto_NQS/Changes/


About NQS


COSMIC NQS

The Network Queueing System (NQS) was written for NASA in 1985 by Sterling Software, Inc. Details of their work can be found in this paper :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Papers/Sterling/
COSMIC is NASA's Software Technology Transfer Centre, based at the University of Georgia since 1966. Their home page is

> http://www.cosmic.uga.edu/
COSMIC released two versions of NQS, known as COSMIC NQS v1, and COSMIC NQS v2. Due to US law, when US companies purchased COSMIC NQS, they purchased full rights to the code, rather than just a license to use the code.


Monsanto-NQS

The Monsanto Company purchased COSMIC NQS v1, and John Roman released and maintained Monsanto-NQS up to, and including, Monsanto-NQS v3.36.0. During this time, enhancements from COSMIC NQS v2, CERN, Boeing, and many individuals were added to the Monsanto-NQS source tree. Monsanto-NQS was released under the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Product/Monsanto_NQS/GPL_v1/
After Monsanto-NQS v3.36.0, John Roman moved on to other projects. Many thanks to John for the work he did on Monsanto-NQS.

The University of Sheffield had recently secured funding from the New Technologies Sub Committee of JISC to investigate freely-available batch processing systems for UNIX. Work began in October, 1994, with an evaluation of freely-available batch processing systems. After consultation with other UK Academic sites, they decided to support, and enhance, Monsanto-NQS further.


Generic NQS

In July, 1995, after consultation with John Roman, it was agreed that new releases would no longer be called Monsanto-NQS. It was felt that the new name should be site-neutral, so that name changes will not be required in the future when the role of maintainer passes on to someone new. The acronim GNQS was adopted, as a play on GNU.

The last release of Monsanto-NQS was v3.37.1. The first release of Generic NQS was v3.40.0, on 29th September 1995.


Other Versions Of NQS

Monsanto is not the only organisation which has released a version of NQS. Other notable releases are :

  • SGI 4D/NQS

    This was supplied with the IRIX 4 operating system. However, it is not compatible with other versions of NQS, and is no longer supported by Silicon Graphics.

    This software is reported to run fine on IRIX 5 and IRIX 6.

  • Sterling NQS (now known as Connect: Queue, I believe)

    SGI are currently supplying this to IRIX customers who have previously relied on 4D/NQS. Previous versions appeared to supply on the basic COSMIC NQS functionality - I've not looked at more recent versions.

  • Cray NQE

    This is stock NQS, with a significant number of proprietry enhancements, sold by CraySoft. Cray NQE is highly customisable, includes GUI and HTML interfaces, and is worth a look if you want a well-supported commercial NQS variant.

    Cray also publish a document containing the original NQS Network Protocol specification.

  • CERN NQS

    This is a derivative of COSMIC NQS, developed and enhanced by Christian Biossat at CERN, in Switzerland. It is freely available, from

    > ftp://shift.cern.ch/pub/NQS/

  • MCC NQS

    This is a derivative of CERN NQS, featuring enhanced support for Solaris 2 and UXP/M, plus a number of extra features, created by the Manchester Computing Centre, UK. This version falls under the same copyright as CERN NQS.

If you have further information about these versions of NQS, or about any others, then please let me know. URLs in particular would be useful ;-)


Alternatives To NQS

The main alternatives to NQS tend to be based around DQS, developed at Florida State University.

> ftp://ftp.scri.fsu.edu/pub/dqs/
I last looked at DQS in October, 1994 - you can find my comments at

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Reports/eval_9410/
There are two major commercial systems which use DQS :

  • GENIAS CODINE

    This is a well featured system (which also uses technology from Condor to provide checkpointing) available from Germany.

    I wrote a report about CODINE v3.3 vs Monsanto-NQS v3.36.6, available from

    > http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Reports/CODINE/

  • IBM LoadLeveller

    I've never seen this product, or any documentation for it, so I can't comment. If anyone wants to contribute some info, please get in touch.

Another alternative is LoadBalancer, from Unison. To be honest, I don't know if this is based on DQS, or is a complete work in its own right. The literature for LoadBalancer claims that it can handle more transactions per second than any other batch processing system. You can find out more from :

> http://www.unison.com/products/operations/loadbalancer/LoadBalancer.html

Source Code Maintenance


About The Maintainers


The University of Sheffield

The batch systems project at the University of Sheffield has just one full-time member of staff, Stuart Herbert (S.Herbert@sheffield.ac.uk), with management support by Academic Computing Services, under the Deputy Director, Chris Cartledge (C.Cartledge@sheffield.ac.uk) and the head of UNIX support, Peter Froggatt (P.Froggatt@sheffield.ac.uk).

We provide the following services (more detail in later sections) :

  • Maintenance of Generic NQS.

  • The WWW Home Pages for Generic NQS.

  • The FTP home site for Generic NQS.

  • Assistance on installation and configuration to UK Academia

  • World-Wide support (on a very limited basis)


Others

I'm looking for programmers who are prepared to contribute time and effort to maintain a port of Generic NQS to different versions of UNIX. If you can help maintain the platform-specific parts of Generic NQS, then please contact me.

The following ports are actively maintained by the following people:

>  -----------------------------------------------------------------
>  Platform		| Maintainer
>  -----------------------------------------------------------------
>  Generic source tree	| Stu
>  IRIX 5.x		| Dave Safford (saff@tamu.edu)
>  IRIX 6.x, 32-bit	| Dave Safford (saff@tamu.edu)
>  Linux		| Stu
>  Solaris 2.3		| Stu
>  UNICOS v8		| Dave Safford (saff@tamu.edu)
>  -----------------------------------------------------------------


Purpose

We provide the following maintenance for Generic NQS :

  • Bug-fixing for reports originating from UK Academic sites.

  • Integration of patches received from any contributor.

  • Co-ordination of new releases.

  • `Official' world-wide releases of new versions.

Our objectives are :

  • To produce a highly-portable version of NQS.

  • To produce a highly-robust version of NQS.

  • To produce a highly-extensible version of NQS.


Bug Fixing

Under the terms and conditions of our funding, we are permitted to actively identify, locate, and solve problems with the source code which are reported to us from UK Academic sites ONLY. Our funding body has made it quite clear that, in their opinion, we should NOT spend time performing this task for non-UK-Academic sites.

However, it is often the case that a problem reported from outside UK Academia will also affect UK Academic sites, and so we attempt to fit in as much `world-wide' support as possible, if only as a preventative measure.

For a list of known problems with Generic NQS, please consult the file `PROBLEMS', included with the source code distribution. You can find a HTML copy at :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Product/GNQS/v3.4x/Problems/


Integration Of Patches

If you look through the CHANGES file, included with the source code, you'll see that the majority of those changes have originated from outside the University of Sheffield.

If you add new functionality to Generic NQS, or port it to a previously unsupported platform, or fix some bugs, then we'd welcome your patch. Personally, I prefer patch files on the entire tree, made using the command :

> diff -u --recursive --new-file &ltold source tree> &ltnew source tree>
New patches are normally integrated into the very next release of Generic NQS, unless your patch raises issues which must be addressed first.


FTP Sites


Generic NQS Source Code


Home Site

The official home site of Generic NQS is :

> ftp://ftp.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/


Mirror Sites

This is mirrored at the following sites :

> ftp://myrddraal.shef.ac.uk/pub/NQS/
> ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Network/distrib/nqs/
If ftp.shef.ac.uk is unavailable, try myrddraal - it's my workstation, so it tends to be up even when everything else isn't.


World-Wide Web Pages


Generic NQS


Home Page

The official home page of Generic NQS is :

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/


Mirrors

This is mirrored at the following sites :

> http://myrddraal.shef.ac.uk/Projects/NQS/
I'm interested in finding a site in North America which is prepared to mirror my Web pages ...


Electronic Mailing Lists


Archives

All the electronic mailing lists below are available, in archive form, from

> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/nqs/Archives/
PLEASE NOTE that, for lists which are not maintained by the University of Sheffield, the archives only cover postings to the lists since our staff joined the lists.

If there are any more NQS-related mailing lists, please let me know, and I'll add them to the archives, and to this document.


Generic NQS Mailing Lists


Introduction

The University of Sheffield currently maintains a number of mailing lists, via the Mailbase service. Mailbase's home page is

> http://www.mailbase.ac.uk
To join any of the lists, send the following command to `Mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk' :

> join &ltlist-name> &ltyour first name> &ltyour last name>
> stop


NQS-Announce

This is a moderated list, which carries announcements of new releases of Generic NQS. I'm also happy to allow any announcements of other NQS products, or of any products related to NQS.

Announcements of new releases of Generic NQS include full lists of what's changed since the last full release of Generic NQS. This is normally the ONLY place where we announce new releases.

I recommend that, if you use Generic NQS, you should subscribe to this list.


NQS-Developers

This is an unmoderated list, which carries most of the discussion of the on-going development of Generic NQS. It also carries announcements of pre-releases of Generic NQS - these are test versions which are released so that the NQS community can help ensure that they work, before they are announced properly.

I recommend subscribing to this list if you want to keep an eye on where Generic NQS is going, and/or especially if you intend to work on the Generic NQS source code yourself.


NQS-Protocol

This is an unmoderated list for the discussion of devising a new networking protocol for the NQS family of software. The current protocol is a binary one, which does not allow for easy expansion without the danger of breaking backwards compatibility. I'm looking to introduce a new, ASCII-based protocol which can eventually be turned over to the Internet Engineering Task Force to (hopefully) become a recognised standard on the Internet.

This list is currently dead, because I don't have time to actively lead the discussion and get things rolling properly. If anyone is interested in running this side of NQS's future, please get in touch.


NQS-Support

This is an unmoderated list. If you have a problem with GNQS, and you need help, then this is the place to ask. While I welcome private mail to me, I do recommend that you at least cc: your mail to this list; that way, others can help if I'm not available.

All Generic NQS users should probably subscribe to this list, especially if you're in need of help.


COSMIC NQS Mailing List

COSMIC also maintain an electronic mailing list, ``nqs-list@cossack.cosmic.uga.edu''. To subscribe, send the following message to listserv@cossack.cosmic.uga.edu :

> subscribe nqs-list
I've only recently (August 1995) subscribed to this list, and so far the only traffic I've seen on the list are replies to my own queries.



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