Dear People - I'd like to announce the availability of a new free job scheduling system for computer clusters. We developed it at UCSC to manage our 1000 machine Linux cluster. It should be quite portable to other operating systems too. The system is called Parasol. Documentation can be found at: http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~donnak/eng/parasol.htm Linux executables are at http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/exe/linux/ in parasol.zip. The source is currently in the middle of quite a large bunch of genomics related source at http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/src at some point we'll put the Parasol sources into a more self-contained unit and publish an article on it. Though most of my stuff requires a license for commercial users, Parasol, at least this version, is free for all. Parasol is intended for dedicated computer clusters. It has no logic like many of the other schedulers do to see if something other than it's own jobs are going on in the compute nodes. This simplifies it quite a bit, and is also one of the reasons it can deal out jobs at the rate of about 500 per second, which is the sort of speed you need for the larger clusters. I hope people find it useful. It's certainly made running jobs on our cluster a lot easier than it was under Condor or Codine. (LFS was too expensive for us to try out). Jim Kent Genome Bioinformatics Group University of California at Santa Cruz http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~kent/