Setting Up a User

You need to perform the following tasks to set up a user for the grid engine system:

• Assign required logins.

  To submit jobs from host A for execution on host B, users must have identical accounts on both hosts. The accounts must have identical user names. No login is required on the machine where sge_qmaster runs.

• Set access permissions.

  The grid engine software enables you to restrict user access to the entire cluster, to queues, and to parallel environments. See Configuring Users for a detailed description.

  In addition, you can grant users permission to suspend or enable certain queues. See Configuring Owners Parameters for more information.

• Declare a Grid Engine System user.

  In order to add users to the share tree or to define functional or override policies for users, you must declare those users to the grid engine system. For more information, see Configuring Policy-Based Resource Management With QMON and Configuring User Objects With QMON.

• Set up project access.

  If projects are used for the definition of share-based, functional, or override policies, you should give the user access to one or more projects. Otherwise the user's jobs might end up in the lowest possible priority class, which would result in the jobs having access to very few resources. See Configuring Policy-Based Resource Management With QMON for more information.

• Set file access restrictions.

  Users of the grid engine system must have read access to the directory sge-root/cell/common.

  Before a job starts, the execution daemon creates a temporary working directory for the job and changes ownership of the directory to the job owner. The execution daemon runs as root. The temporary directory is removed as soon as the job finishes. The temporary working directory is created under the path defined by the queue configuration parameter tmpdir. See the queue_conf(5) man page for more information.

  Make sure that temporary directories can be created under the tmpdir location. The directories should be set to grid engine system user ownership. Users should be able to write to the temporary directories.

• Set up site dependencies.

  By definition, batch jobs do not have a terminal connection. Therefore UNIX commands like stty in the command interpreter's startup resource file (for example, .cshrc for csh) can lead to errors. Check for the occurrence of stty in startup files. Avoid the commands that are described in Chapter 6, Verifying the Installation, in Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 Installation Guide.

  Because batch jobs are usually run off line, only two ways exist to notify a job owner about error events and the like. One way is to log the error messages to a file, the other way is to send email.

  Under some rare circumstances, for example, if the error log file can't be opened, email is the only way to directly notify the user. Error messages are logged to the grid engine system log file anyway, but usually the user would not look at the system log file. Therefore the email system should be properly installed for grid engine users.

• Set up grid engine system definition files.

  You can set up the following definition files for grid engine users:

  • qmon – Resource file for the grid engine system GUI. See Customizing QMON in Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 User’s Guide.

  • sge_aliases – Aliases for the path to the current working directory. See Using Path Aliasing.

  • sge_request – Default request definition file. See Configuring Default Requests.