Migrate from LSF

If you are a user of LSF™ moving to Accelerator, you need to be aware of some terminology shift.

For example, in Accelerator terminology, the word 'queue' has a different meaning from the one used by other batch systems. For Accelerator, a queue is a group of compute hosts managed by a single Altair Accelerator vovserver program. The name of the queue should start with the letters 'vnc'.

The following table summarizes the differences in terminology between LSF and Accelerator.

Table 1. Comparison of Main Concepts
LSF Accelerator
LSF master vovserver
LSF (compute) server vovtasker
LSF cluster VOV queue or VOV project
LSF queue VOV jobclass
Table 2. Comparison of Main Commands
LSF Accelerator
bsub nc run
bjobs nc list, nc monitor, nc gui
bstop nc stop
lshosts nc hosts

To ease the migration from LSF to Accelerator, a set of emulation scripts are provided for commands such as bsub and bjobs. These scripts can be found in $VOVDIR/scripts/lsfemulation.

Emulating LSF_JOBINDEX

In Accelerator, job arrays are just a simple way to submit lots of jobs that are pretty similar. Each element of the array is actually a regular job. You can pass the index of the job in the array by variable substitution. To emulate LSF_JOBINDEX, you can use the following technique:
% nc run -e SNAPSHOT+D,LSF_JOBINDEX=@INDEX@ -array 100 someCommandWithArgs