Is it possible to submit jobs to hpc cluster without purchasing MDCS?

It is possible to submit jobs to remote systems with just PCT, so it seems this should be possible. We don't want to use our HPC cluster to have tasks run on multiple systems, because our individual systems within the cluster are large enough (64 cores each). We just want to take advantage of the HPC scheduler so the jobs do not interfere with other jobs (other software) running on these systems.

Answer 1

[Ahmet Cecen]

Disclaimer: I am no expert.

I don't see how the two interact at any level. The cluster is probably using some scheduler that accepts some sort of PBS script as input like:

 qsub myjob.sh

Inside that myjob, the instance the scheduler has generated will have access to every module you have loaded, probably similar to:

 module load MATLAB

After that, based on the license information you have input, your calls to MATLAB will not have access to MDCS, so every process you are running will be limited to a single node. If you have the PCT, it should still access to all cores within a node. Just make sure you don't imply and MDCS functionality in your code or in the function call:

 matlab mycode.m -parameter1 - parameter2

So make sure neither mycode.m nor parameter1 etc. references a functionality of MDCS. It might also be that you need a flag parameter to make it NOT ACCESS MDCS, though I am not knowledgeable in that aspect.

[Mark Holman]

We finally got around to testing this a bit. The first issue is licensing. We received errors if the person submitting the job via the HPC manager did not have an active license on the computeNode where the job ran in the cluster. We resolved that and submitted

 "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2016a\bin\matlab.exe" -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "run('\\Sharename\hpctest.m')"

Within the HPC job monitor the job finishes without error, but there is no output. What I am suspecting is the initial cmd was successful which essentially is spawning a qui instance (these are Windows computeNodes) which fails since this is a remote cmd with no logged on user or console session.