[VoxBo] Many vbbatch sequences in the queue

[Eduardo Europa]

The problem came up again last week. The error I received was:

vbbatch: error telling scheduler about the new sequence

I had numerous jobs running where each was supposed to dispatch 3-4 vbbatch sequences. I noticed that some sequences were dispatched into the queue while others failed, giving me the error above in a log file (regardless of the number of concurrently running vbbatch sequences in the queue, there were many present this time).

Dan, I know the VoxBo queue is working differently now, so I'm not sure if this problem would happen again. I was just curious to know if anyone knows what was going on and if this can be avoided in the future.

Eddie

____________________
Eduardo Europa, B.A.
Research Assistant
EuropaEd at einstein.edu

Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute
Albert Einstein Healthcare Network
60 E. Township Line Road
Elkins Park, PA 19027
215-663-6871 (Tue)

Center for Functional Neuroimaging
Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania
3400 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-615-4764 (Mon, Wed-Fri)
>>> "Eduardo Europa" <EuropaEd at einstein.edu> 03/04/09 1:17 PM >>>
Yesterday, I tried to regenerate the error message in the same way that I received it without success (which is technically a good thing). However, the example you gave is correct. I received the error by reading the log file. I only remember that it started out with "vbbatch:" and the message was to the effect of "vbbatch was unable to schedule the sequence". I am not entirely certain that it runs perfectly at 7, but never at 8, but I did try and keep the number under 10 as I've heard before that the VoxBo does not like 10 vbbatch sequences queued at the same time.

Eddie

__________________________________
Eduardo Europa
Research Assistant

Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute
60 E. Township Line Road
Elkins Park, PA 19027
215-456-6871
europaed at einstein.edu

>>> Daniel Kimberg <kimberg at mail.med.upenn.edu> 3/2/2009 9:53 PM >>>
"Eduardo Europa" <europaed at einstein.edu> wrote:
> I recently tried to simultaneously run multiple jobs where each
> yielded multiple vbbatch sequences in the Voxbo queue. Some jobs would
> run all the vbbatch sequences and complete without error. Other jobs
> would only run some vbbatch sequences and the remaining files for the
> job would be considered "bad" (e.g. the other vbbatch sequences were
> not "dispatched" to the queue). The error message was something to the
> effect of "vbbatch was unable to schedule sequence".

I'm trying to decode this, and I think I need a bit more information about what you did and what happened.

I'll make up some numbers to make it more concrete.  So first you submitted, say, 10 jobs to the queue (either all in the same sequence or each in its own).  Each of those 10 jobs was supposed to create 7 vbbatch sequences, for a total of 70 sequences.  For some of those 10 jobs, all 7 sequences ran.  But for others, only some ran.  And somewhere along the line, you got an error message.

It would be a great help if you could forward the exact error message, and tell me whether you got it by email, by looking at a log file, or at the command line.

My best guess is that if the invocations of vbbatch were using the -a and -s flags, the separate jobs inadvertently used the same private sequence name, and were overwriting each other's files.  This would certainly lead to some jobs running and not others, and often an error submitting the sequence if two vbbatch -s commands are run without any jobs added to the private sequence in between.  There's no reason why the magical number would be 8, though.  Are you sure it always runs perfectly with 7 and never with 8?

dan



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