[clug] Sun Grid Engine

[Andrew Janke]

>> Sort of...  Meaning you want to do batch processing on windows machines on
>> Office things via OLE?
>
> *nod*  One of the less pleasant requirements we have is to generate PowerPoint
> slide sets from data we collect and process.  Given that generating this has
> consumed three or four hours of CPU time in the past, and that the only
> interface that can do it is driving PPT via OLE automation[1]...

Ah, completely understand.  In the past I have surreptitiously
achieved this (although the requirement was for excel spreadsheets and
graphs to display end results) via automating openoffice and then
saving as excel...  I am sure such thoughts of using OO have already
passed your mind though.

I haven't even it looked at it but is there any scope here to modify
an existing .pptx files XML?

> Part of the desire is to have one application, which we drive from inside our
> software on Linux, if possible.  Finding some Microsoft hosted batch
> processing solution is the next step down the line when ^W if something
> integrated fails.

;)


>> Well for what we do (Automated medical image analysis) SGE is the better
>> choice.
>
> *nod*  I presume that is just "better fit" and not "Condor does X awfully". ;)

Correct!  I have tried Condor years ago but given that nearly
everything we do it embarrassingly parallel (100 jobs on 100 CPUs) all
we need is good job tracking, dependency tracking, resource monitoring
(RAM) and robust job scheduling (meaning is one job crashes because a
machine does, its scratch is cleaned up and the job is re-run).



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