NQS questions

[toon at news.sara.nl]

L.S.,

   At SARA we operate a Cray Y-MP4 for nationwide academic research.
We would like to give users all over the country access to these
computing resources via the Network Queueing System (NQS).

Two problems prohibit this, however.

1. We would like to have a simple 'algorithm' to determine what machine
   id to use for any site requesting the service. The point is that these
   machine id's have to be unique over all systems using the NQS service.
   We would like to know if and how other people have overcome this
   problem. Several approaches come to mind:
   . Use the internet number of the machine as its machine id. Although
     this works on the Cray, on 32 bit machines this leads (at least for
     internet numbers in B or C class networks) to an error, because
     these numbers, when viewed as an 'int' are negative and thus refused
     by NQS.
   . Use some form of (the numeric part of) the ZIP code or telephone number
     of the requesting institute. This, however, is hard to internationalize.
   . Act as a clearing house for machine id's ourselves.

2. NQS uses one of two methods for mapping local users to remote user
   accesses: either the mapping is by user name, in that the jobs run
   under the user with the same name as the one submitting the job, or
   it is by user id, with a database of mappings between local uids and
   pairs of (machine id, uid-on-that-machine).
   The last method would be our favorite, for quite obvious reasons,
   but ... UNICOS NQS doesn't seem to support this option (You can
   translate the NQS software with the option enabled, but QMAPMGR,
   the utility to enter the above mentioned mappings, doesn't have
   commands to add local uid - (machine id, remote uid) data).

   We would appreciate if some one could shed some light on how to
tackle these problems, as we run out of steam here. 

Any hints or examples of how you resolved this are extremely welcome.

With kind regards,

Toon Moene, SARA - Amsterdam (NL)
Internet: TOON at SARA.NL

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