1. Qube
2. Qube! Documentation
3. Administrator's Guide
4. Managing Qube!
5. Common Worker Actions
6. Worker Locking

Worker Locking

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When you don't have a dedicated compute farm, it is often necessary to enlist existing put user's machines into part-time service. So, for example, the hosts might be available for computing say at night, but not during the day. It can be quite inconvenient to start and stop the Qube! Worker every day. It would be better if there were a way to simply tag Workers as available or not, depending upon the circumstances.

Qube! manages this tagging through a system of "locks" that effectively control the number of available subjob slots on any Worker host. Closing out one or more subjob slots is called "locking." This is controllable from either the QubeGUI or the commandline WranglerView UI or by command-line calls to qblock and qbunlock.

Locking/Unlocking with the Qube! WranglerView

In the QubeGUIWranglerView, the Host Layout provides locking/unlocking capabilities for the Workers. Right-click on a Worker or Workers and then select one of the following:

...

If choosing one of the "Lock" options, decide if you want to "Purge running jobs" from the machine so it , which stops those processes immediately and then requeues them on other machines.

...

qblock and qbunlock can be used to lock and unlock one or more slots on the specified host(s):

qblock host [host,…]
qbunlock host [host,…]

where host is a list of one more host names.

A The --all flag can be used in place of the hostname.  When using the --all flag, only hosts which match the other criteria are operated upon: 

qblock --all
qblock --cluster /myCluster --all all
qbunlock --active --all 

By default, qblock locks out all of the subjob slots on the host, but you can also quantify the number of slots to lock or unlock:

...

where rangespec is either a slot number, a comma-delimited list of slots, a range or some combination.

Example

...

% qblock % qblock myhost
% qblock % qblock --range 0, 1 sb005

See Also

For more information see the qblock and qbunlock sections in the Commandline Command Line Reference section of the Qube Users ! Render Wrangler's Guide or using the "--help" option to qblock/qbunlock.