ictasks 0.1.1

A utility to run multiple small tasks in a single HPC job submission.

ictasks

This is a set of utilities to support running groups of small tasks as part of a single HPC batch submission at ICHEC.

The repo includes:

1. the ictasks package with tooling building blocks
2. Snapshots of the ICHEC Taskfarm tool available on our HPC systems in the applications directory.

Installing

The package can be installed from PyPI:

pip install ictasks

Features

Taskfarm

The taskfarm feature will launch the tasks in the pointed to tasklist file:

ictasks taskfarm --tasklist $PATH_TO_TASKLIST

See the test/data/tasklist.dat file for an example input with two small tasks.

If you run this on your local machine it will create a directory per task, launch the task in that directory and output a status file task.json. By default all processors on the machine (or compute node) will be assigned tasks. There are two ways to control this, and many other, settings:

1. With environment variables using a TASKFARM_ prefix, consistent with the original ICHEC taskfarm tool and documented here: https://www.ichec.ie/academic/national-hpc/documentation/tutorials/task-farming

2. With a config file in yaml format - passed in with a --config command line argument. Config values take precedence over environment variables if both are specified for the same setting.

Using a config file

The config file below shows an example constraining tasks to run on only a single core per compute node. We can also specify tasks in the config instead of in a tasklist file.

environment:
	job_id: my_job
	workers:
		cores_per_node: 1

tasks:
	items:
	  - id: 0
	    launch_cmd: "echo 'hello from task 0'"
	  - id: 1
	    launch_cmd: "echo 'hello from task 1'"

we can run this with:

ictasks taskfarm --config my_config.yaml

License

This package is Coypright of the Irish Centre for High End Computing. It can be used under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). See the included LICENSE.txt file for details.