Running Commands

Aside from running PDS scripts to iteratively run several instances of an executable with different inputs, it’s also possible to run PDriver to run a single command on the Grid, and then collect the results later. This ca nbe used to run a one-time command, or to use another scripting language to run a multi-task job.

The bsub command can be used to run a command on a single Engine in the Grid. For example, if you have Windows Engines on your Grid, you can type the following command (UNIX users must replace the dir with ls.):

bsub dir

This submits a single-task job to an Engine, and returns the batch ID in the Driver logs.

The bcoll command is used to collect the results after using bsub. To collect the results, you simply need to give bcoll the batch ID. For example:

bcoll 149463216266848451

The results are fetched into a new directory with the same name as the batch ID. The directory contains a bsub.err file with the stderr output of the job, and a bsub.out file containing the stdout output of the job. In this case, the bsub.out file contains a directory listing of the Engine that ran the job.