GlideinWMS The Glidein-based Workflow Management System

Overview

The purpose of the glideinWMS is to provide a simple way to access the Grid resources. GlideinWMS is a Glidein Based WMS (Workload Management System) that works on top of Condor. For those familiar with the Condor system, it is used for scheduling and job control.

The glideinWMS is made of several services (In animation to the right, you can see this process with green circles representing jobs, black circles as glideins, gray as resources in Condor ).

• Users submit jobs to the User Pool Condor schedd process.
• The GlideinWMS Frontend polls the user pool to make sure that there are enough glideins (worker nodes) to satisfy user jobs. It submits requests to the glidein factory to submit glideins.
• Alternatively, users can control their workflow with the CorralWMS frontend.
• The glidein factory and WMS pool receives requests from the frontend(s) and submits a condor startd wrapper to entry points (grid sites).
• The grid sites receive the jobs and starts a condor startd that joins the user pool. This shows up as a resource in the user pool.

Once setup, final users can submit regular Condor jobs to the local queue and the glidein factory will provide the computing resources behind the scenes. From the final user point of view, the Condor pool just magically grows and shrinks as needed. The user need not worry about grid entry points, managing queues, or provisioning worker nodes.

Current release

For release information, see the Download Page.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What can glideinWMS be used for?
  The glideinWMS can be used to shield regular users from the Grid.
  A user will submit a vanilla or standard job to a local Condor schedd and the glideinWMS will make sure the job runs somewhere.
  A user need not worry about site selection or other grid technicalities.
• If the glideinWMS is Condor based, does this mean it can only be used on Grid sites that use Condor as the underlying batch system?
  No. Condor is used just as a WMS batch system (i.e. a user submits to a local condor_schedd).
  Any grid resource can be used using glideinWMS.
• What are the advantages of using glideins?
  Installing and configuring the glidein infrastructure can be daunting, but it has a lot of advantages. Once configured, the ease of submitting jobs to the grid is vastly simplified. In addition, glideins allow worker nodes to process multiple jobs. If a job finishes and there are still unmatched jobs in the user pool, the glidein will continue servicing the user pool.
  GlideinWMS also solves many problems with the grid. If a site is malfunctioning , this will only affect the glidein factory (see animation). User jobs will not be lost to the broken site. Other similar problems will be shielded from users.
• How do I submit jobs?
  See our user tutorials with example job submission for both VO and Corral Frontends. These examples assume you have a working glideinWMS installation.