Jobs and Processes

When a serial program executes on a Sun HPC cluster, it becomes a Solaris process with a Solaris process ID, or pid.

When the CRE executes a distributed message-passing program it spawns multiple Solaris processes, each with its own pid.

The CRE also assigns a job ID, or jid, to the program. If it is an MPI job, the jid applies to the overall job. Job IDs always begin with a j to distinguish them from pids. Many CRE commands take jids as arguments. For example, you can issue an mpkill command with a signal number or name and a jid argument to send the specified signal to all processes that make up the job specified by the jid.