Re: transfer and NFS homes

[Ole Tange]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:47 PM, Thomas Sattler
<sattler@med.uni-frankfurt.de> wrote:
> OK, here is how I (nearly) killed my cluster:

I like the sound of it: GNU Parallel - the cluster killer!

> As I asked before in "issues with --load": Shouldn't we take
> more care that (not-so-experienced) users do not overload
> their machines by accident?

It is extremely hard to tell the difference between a power user
maxing out a server and a novice doing something that overloads the
server. I have several times used GNU Parallel causing a cpu load of >
1000, because it was faster to complete my task that way.

GNU Parallel is made for power users and that is its primary goal. If
novices can use it aswell, then that is fine, but GNU Parallel will
not shield beginners against mistakes if that makes it harder to use
for power users.

That does not mean that I will not implement functionality that will
help beginners. Case in point: The warning message you get when
entering 'parallel' with no input or arguments is due to a beginner
being confused by nothing happening.

> In this case: Shouldn't GNU parallel detect a situation like
> this ("transfer to NFS homes") and exit with an error?

Definitely no. I use multiple systems, some have nfs-homes and I want
to be able to --transfer to those.


/Ole