Task Spooler

Task Spooler is a simple batch queue system written by Lluís Batlle i Rossell.

TS is meant for standalone PCs (*nix/Linux/OsX, probably CygWin too) and it does not need to be installed as a system-level daemon. It's a quick solution for running batch jobs (like Geant simulations etc) without installing Condor or PBS - on laptops, for example. It's extremely lightweight (<300kB of code), tidy, and is not abandoned like GNU Queue.

It's better than the standard Unix batch because it runs immediately, without waiting for the 1 or 5 minute schedule of atd (which is nice when you have many short jobs), and because running atd on laptops interferes with power management (which is why atd is disabled by default on OsX). The server daemon is started automatically when you first invoke ts, and it completely detaches from the console, so you do not need to run it inside a screen session if you want to use it on a remote host and disconnect from it - and you don't need to worry if you close a terminal window by mistake.

(Sergio) I have written a patch to add support for multiple slots, which is useful for simple load balancing on multicore or multiprocessor machines. You have to set the environment variable TS_SLOTS to the number of CPUs you have before the first invocation of ts; maximum is 4 but you can easily change that in jobs.c. You can find the patch here, since it's not integrated in the main trunk yet (as of 13 July 2008). The base code for this patch is ts-0.5.4.1.tar.gz; please check the TS home page for updated versions.