5.683 Service Jobs

Torque service jobs are a special kind of job that is treated differently by Torque than normal batch jobs. Torque service jobs are not related to Moab's dynamic service jobs. A Torque service job cannot dynamically grow and shrink in size over time.

Jobs are marked as service jobs at the time they are submitted to Moab or Torque. Just like a normal job, a script file is specified with the job. In a batch job, the contents of the script file are taken by Torque and executed on the compute nodes. For a service job, however, the script file is assumed to respond to certain command-line arguments. Instead of just executing the script, Torque will use these command-line arguments to start, stop, and check on the status of the job. Listed below are the three command-line arguments that must be supported by any script submitted as part of a Torque service job:

• start: The script should take this argument and launch its service/workload. The script should remain executing/running until the service stops.
• stop: The script should take this argument and stop the service/workload that was earlier started.
• status: The script should take this argument and return, via standard out, either "running" if the service/workload is running as expected or "stopped" if the service is not running.

This feature was created with long-running services in mind. The command-line arguments should be familiar to users who interact with Unix services, as each of the service scripts found in /etc/init.d/ also accept and respond to the arguments as explained above.

For example, if a user wants to start the Apache 2 server on a compute node, they can use a Torque service job and specify a script which will start, stop, and check on the status of the "httpd" daemon--possibly by using the already present /etc/init.d/httpd script.

For details, see these topics:

• Submitting Service Jobs
• Submitting Service Jobs in MCM
• Managing Service Jobs

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