XPBS at MCSR

Before the definition of xpbs and its features, the Portable Batch System (PBS) should be defined. PBS is a flexible batch queueing and workload management system originally developed by Veridian Systems for NASA. It operates on networked, multi-platform UNIX environments, including heterogeneous clusters of workstations, supercomputers, and massively parallel systems.

Xpbs is GUI front end to PBS commands which provides a user-friendly point-and-click interface to PBS commands. If you submit programming jobs on a multi-user machine, and you don't have any detailed idea of how to use pbs features from command line, then xpbs command will help you learn and use pbs in few minutes.

Running xpbs will initialize the X resource database from various sources in the following order:

• The RESOURCE_MANAGER property on the root window (updated via xrdb) with settings usually defined in the .Xdefaults file
• Preference settings defined by the system administrator in the global xpbsrc file
• User's ~/.xpbsrc file - this file defines various X resources like fonts, colors, list of PBS hosts to query, criteria for listing queues and jobs, and various view states.

If you are going to run xpbs, there are few things you need to check. First of all, you have to setup your DISPLAY variable as the right host name by using the following commands below:

• For csh (tcsh) users:
  1. setenv DISPLAY '':0
  2. xpbs
• For sh (ksh) users:
  1. import DISPLAY=:0
  2. xpbs
• Where, in each case, is actually the hostname or IP address of the machine you are connecting from.

One last tip: if you are using a Windows O/S, then you should either connect to the host using Xwin-32 or run XWin-32 in the background when you are using other kinds of connection software, such as SSH Secure Shell.

Please contact assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu for further information and assistance.