Re: Cygnus, drone, etc... (was Re: drone and windows NT. Any success stories?

[Theodore C. Belding]

Hi Catherine-

On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Catherine Dibble wrote:

> Actually... you don't need Drone at all under Cygnus or
> under Linux/Unix.  A simple Unix shell script works fine
> in either environment.  It runs my GUI jobs and logs my
> text and *.png files just fine.  I've done hundreds of
> runs this way so far -- sometimes for days at a time.

Sure, you can just use a shell script instead of Drone, for simple things,
especially if you're only using a single host. Drone in fact started out
as a 1-line shell script. But Drone has a lot of features beyond what a
simple shell script can do, especially for experiment logging and
replication, and for running many simulations simultaneously on many
remote hosts (starting a new simulation as soon as one of the remote hosts
finishes a run).

> Another advantage is that the parameter sweeps can be
> set arbitrarily, i.e. do x for 5 10 25 100
> in order to do 4 runs using x at 5 10 25 and 100 respectively.
> Obviously, the loops can also be nested arbitrarily deep -
> all you need is the CPU time to do the runs.  :)

You can run arbitrary parameter sweeps using Drone as well:

sweep x 5 10 25 100

Your point is valid: Not everyone needs to use Drone, and there are other
ways to accomplish many of the same goals, including using features of
Swarm itself. But Drone is a scalable, general-purpose tool that many
people find useful for a variety of tasks. It's good that we have more
than one tool to choose from.

For those who aren't already familiar with Drone:
http://drone.sourceforge.net/ 
-Ted

-- 
Ted Belding                              address@hidden 
University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~streak/
PGP key:  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~streak/pgp-key.html




                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.