Kb21

Emulab FAQ: Using the Testbed: I only need a couple of nodes but none are free, should I just keep trying?

It is better for you and us if you don't just keep hitting the submit button every few minutes. It wastes your time and floods us with email (we get every failure message you do!) Instead, you can now use the Batch System to queue an interactive job. By submitting your experiment as a batch job, but without any tb-set-node-startcmd directives in your NS file, the job will be queued until nodes are available. For most experiments, this means just using your regular NS file, and checking the Batch Mode Experiment box when you create the experiment.

When your queued job is swapped in, you will be sent email to inform you, and you can start working! Please note that the experiment will be idle when it is swapped in, and will be idle swapped if you do not get things running on the nodes in a short period of time. If your experiment does get swapped out before you can get to it, you can always visit the experiment's information page and try again by using the Queue Batch Experiment menu item.