Businesses and organisations, who are providing services to customers, know the importance of job schedulers which orchestrate the execution and facilitate the integration of processes that run on different computers. Such job scheduler, or workload automation, provides a point of control to monitor unattended computer programs. ecFlow is the work flow package, developed at ECMWF, that enables users to run a large number of programmes (with dependencies on each other and on time) in a controlled environment. It provides reasonable tolerance for hardware and software failures, combined with good restart capabilities. It is used at ECMWF for most of our operational suites, across a range of platforms. ecFlow ecFlow executes tasks (jobs) and receives acknowledgements from the associated job when it changes status or when it sends events. It does this using using child commands embedded in the scripts. ecFlow ecFlow stores the relationship between tasks and is able to submit tasks dependent on triggers. ecFlow is complemented by ecFlowview, its graphical interface that allow users to have immediate grasp, using colour coding, on the status of the various programs or processes handled by the scheduler. The course will look at the various elements of the scheduler and its graphical interface. By the end of the course participants will have a good understanding of the various features of ecFlow and shall be capable of designing their own suite. |