Single job submission ¶

BOINC is designed to handle streams of millions of jobs. It takes some work to set up a stream: you need to create apps and app versions, WU and result templates, validators, assimilators, etc.

BOINC's single job submission mechanism lets you run a job without any of this hassle. To do this, configure your BOINC server to handle single jobs (see below). Set the environment variable BOINC_PROJECT_DIR to the root directory of the project. cd into a directory containing a program and its input files. Then type

~/boinc/tools/boinc_submit [boinc-options] program [program-options]

The boinc-options are:

--infile name

specifies an input file.

--stdin name

direct the given file to the program's stdin.

--outfile name

specifies an output file.

--stdout name

direct the program's stdout to the given file.

--platform

the platform on which the program is to be run (default: the server's platform; assumed to be Linux).

You can include as many --infile and --outfile options as you want, and at most one of others.

The program-options will be passed as command-line arguments to the program when it runs on the remote machine.

If the program requires any non-standard libraries, link these statically. Otherwise it will fail on machines that lack these libraries.

You can run boinc_submit from any host that NSF-mounts your project directory and can access the MySQL database.

When the job is completed successfully, the output files will appear in the job directory.

Monitoring jobs ¶

The following options are available for monitoring jobs:

boinc_submit --jobs

Show a list of jobs, both in progress and completed.

boinc_submit --abort jobID

Abort the given job.

Configuring BOINC for single jobs ¶

Download the latest server code and upgrade your project. The single-job mechanism uses the "wrapper" program from boinc/samples/wrapper. cd to your project's home directory and type

html/ops/single_job_setup.php path-to-boinc-samples

and follow the resulting instructions.

You should periodically update your boinc/ source code to get bug fixes for "wrapper". After you do this, re-run the single_job_setup.php script as above.

Job estimates and limits ¶

Jobs submitted this way will have the following parameters:

• processing estimate: 1 GFLOPS-hour
• processing bound: 1 GFLOPS-day
• memory bound: 500MB
• disk bound: 1GB
• delay bound: 1 week

You can change these by editing the boinc_submit script.

Using other platforms ¶

By default, this mechanism works only for the server platform. For example, if your server is Linux/x86_64, then your applications must be for that platform, and your jobs will run only on hosts of that platform.

You can use other platforms (says, windows_intelx86) by doing the following:

• Go to your project's apps directory.
• Create directories apps/single_job_windows_intel86/1.0/windows_intel86.
• Download the BOINC wrapper executable for windows_intelx86, and put it in the windows_intelx86 directory.
• Go to your project's root directory
• Run bin/update_versions. Answer yes to all questions.
• Restart the project.

You can then submit jobs to Windows/x86 hosts:

• Create a directory with a Windows executable for your application, say app.exe
• Type a command of the form

  boinc_submit --platform windows_intelx86 app.exe
  

Notes ¶

The single job submission system is a work in progress. Various features haven't been implemented (let us know if you need them).

• Redundancy greater than 1 (could require homogeneous redundancy).
• Control over job parameters such as deadline, FLOPS, disk, and memory limits.
• Code-signing of the program file