Copyright ©2016

International Structural Engineers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved



SCHEDULE Automated Job Submission System Guide and Reference Manual

SCHEDULE
Automated Job Submission System
Guide and Reference Manual

for HP-UX, Solaris, AIX and Linux

This manual describes, for the new or experienced user, the SCHEDULE job submission software, including job scheduling concepts, the command line options and the report writer utility.

Revision: Version V7.7.12

Revision/Update Information: Release date: December 1, 2016 ISE, Inc.
P.O. Box 836
Hawthorne, CA 90251
November 22, 2016


Copyright ©2016

All Rights Reserved

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by International Structural Engineers, Incorporated (ISE). ISE assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document.

The software described in this document is furnished under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise - without the permission of ISE.

Contents Index


Preface

This SCHEDULE Guide and Reference Manual describes the features and operations of the SCHEDULE Job Scheduling and Submission System. SCHEDULE automates job submission, simplifying the scheduling of simple to complex jobs. Job definitions can be set up with a variety of features, restrictions and interdependencies.

Intended audience

This manual is intended to introduce both the novice and the experienced system manager to the many features of SCHEDULE. The general user will be able to accomlish routine tasks such as submitting a job according to a set schedule.

Structure of this document

Information in this manual is divided into several sections, each containing several chapters. They are:

Conventions used in this document

The following notational conventions are used:
Convention Meaning
filename An item enclosed in square brackets is an optional not a required item.
SCHEDULE System prompts and user responses are displayed in this fixed pitch typeface.
return In many examples, the name of the key appears in angle brackets.
... Ellipsis in a command specification indicates that the prev ious item can be repeated.
(D) This appears next to many qualifiers and other command options. It indicates that this is the DEFAULT value or option.


Part 1
Introductory Concepts

This part of the manual contains the introduction to SCHEDULE and describes some of the essential concepts that are used in it's operation.


Chapter 1
Introduction

This chapter introduces the major concepts surrounding job scheduling in SCHEDULE . The objective of a scheduling system is to automatically create and run jobs according to a set of preset parameters. While some job schedulers can run jobs according to the time of day, SCHEDULE does much more.

SCHEDULE lets you schedule a stream of jobs that are interconnected based on what other jobs in the stream are doing. If you want to run a report only after all the departments payrolls are completed, SCHEDULE can do it. And without all the time and hassles most schedulers are known for. SCHEDULE jobs and connections can be viewed graphically in a MOTIF window.

SCHEDULE jobs can be synchronized with other jobs on other nodes in the cluster or even network1. All these factors make SCHEDULE the most comprehensive software available for scheduling jobs on today's complex systems.

Note

1 EnterpriseSCHEDULE allows the scheduling of jobs on other platforms as well

1.1 Today's typical job overload

In a typical work day, there are probably a dozen or more tasks you must accomplish on your system that must be performed at regular times of the day in a specific order. You may need files from your on-line directory or files stored off-line. You may need data from a site in another part of the country or from other areas of your own department. What you don't need is to run around every day checking for data files and then submitting each job manually while trying to meet the schedule deadlines.

For example, suppose you are responsible for keeping the general ledger up to date for the entire sales department. For this purpose, the accounting department has written a program, GENLEDGER.EXE, which takes input data from the file TRNSC_TDAY.DAT and computes all of the accounts which must be credited or debited, and then generates a report for the Accounting Department. The TRNSC_TDAY.DAT file is then flagged as completed.

Before GENLEDGER.EXE can run, the file TRNSC_TDAY.DAT itself must be updated. To do this, you've written a script, DEPTQRY, which runs five times to query each of the five departments as to completion of entry of the financial transactions conducted that day. Three of the departments always respond by the scheduled time, but two are often late with their figures and this creates serious problems. You cannot run GENLEDGER.EXE until you get the proper input file from all five runs of DEPTQRY but there are only two ways you can tell if this has happened:

  1. Call each of the department heads and ask them
  2. Examine the file TRNSC_TDAY.DAT himself to see if it has been updated

What you really needs is a program that will:

It would be even nicer if the program could automatically skip weekends or holidays and to wait until 4:00 pm to allow as many transactions per day as possible.

This is precisely the sort of problem that SCHEDULE can handle. It is an automated job-submission and execution system which allows you to:

Many attributes and lists of information associated with each job aid in making SCHEDULE invaluable in job scheduling.

1.2 The SCHEDULE solution

There are many other types of problems that are faced by every data center. Routine production operations from batch processing, archiving to tape, and disk and file optimization can form a large part of both the system managers and the system operators everyday workloads. Reducing this workload greatly enhances the efficiency of your data center and productivity overall, as well as avoiding the costly mistakes and staff dissatisfaction that result from regular mundane tasks.

SCHEDULE allows you to automate production tasks from sophisticated business-critical procedures to simple routine backups. In fact, once a production schedule has been developed, there is little need for further intervention until the system changes.

SCHEDULE also enables you to differentiate between application programming and operation analysis. That means application programmers can concentrate on program logic and operation analysts can develop job schedules best able to cope with the pressures of a production environment.

SCHEDULE can automate the running of all types of repetitive production jobs on the appropriate day of the week or month, at specific intervals, or according to a defined calendar. See Section 2.1.1 for more on job rescheduling. A wide variety of repeat patterns and interdependencies between jobs can be set up.

Applications destined for automated `lights-out' and `hands-off' operations can be assembled from simple batch jobs into sophisticated job streams with conditional branching base on application or system detected error conditions.

The SCHEDULE System is partitioned into two basic functions. A server process that performs all primary operations. Several different client foreground programs that send basic function and action requests to the server process. There are two ways to work with SCHEDULE

  1. The MOTIF interface
  2. A line command interface, Chapter 4

Several types of data are maintained by the SCHEDULE System. To simplify the management of a large number of jobs the database is organized with a top level directory and optionally one sublevel directory. Any number or type of directories can exist. See Section 2.3.3 for more on directories.

These directories can be assigned to specific users or groups of users. Inside each directory jobs and calendars can be defined. Once a job has become active a controlling entry is maintained in the schedule queue system. The scheduling queues represent the various states that a job can be in (for example waiting for disk space). As the job progresses it is moved from one queue to the next. Whenever such a transition takes place an entry is made into the history file. A replay of the history data can be made to determine when and in what order these transitions took place.

An active job is one that has an entry in the scheduling queue system. Only jobs that are active will ever be submitted into batch for execution. For a job to become active any one of the following must happen.

The SCHEDULE System creates batch jobs. These jobs are entered into the standard batch system. As such they can be directed into generic cluster wide queues or node specific execution queues. The single biggest advantage to using this approach is that all jobs, whether created by the SCHEDULE System or created by other means appear in a common queue structure and can be managed in a cohesive and centralized fashion by all standard Digital and non-Digital utilities.

All such jobs are properly recorded in the accounting log as batch jobs. Jobs that are directed into cluster wide generic queues are readily revectored from one node to another as nodes go down. The execution attributes (such things as quota and priority) can be controlled for both the queue and for the user.

Scheduled jobs consist of operational control information and scripts. The control information includes:

1.3 Main features

Some of the main features are:


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