Condor job using DAG with some jobs needing to run the same host

Question

I have a computation task which is split in several individual program executions, with dependencies. I'm using Condor 7 as task scheduler (with the Vanilla Universe, due do constraints on the programs beyond my reach, so no checkpointing is involved), so DAG looks like a natural solution. However some of the programs need to run on the same host. I could not find a reference on how to do this in the Condor manuals.

Example DAG file:

JOB  A  A.condor 
JOB  B  B.condor 
JOB  C  C.condor    
JOB  D  D.condor
PARENT A CHILD B C
PARENT B C CHILD D

I need to express that B and D need to be run on the same computer node, without breaking the parallel execution of B and C.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Condor doesn't have any simple solutions, but there is at least one kludge that should work:

Have B leave some state behind on the execute node, probably in the form of a file, that says something like MyJobRanHere=UniqueIdentifier". Use the STARTD_CRON support to detect this an advertise it in the machine ClassAd. Have D use Requirements=MyJobRanHere=="UniqueIdentifier". A part of D's final cleanup, or perhaps a new node E, it removes the state. If you're running large numbers of jobs through, you'll probably need to clean out left-over state occasionally.