11.3 Upgrading from the 8.6 series to the 8.8 series of HTCondor

Upgrading from the 8.6 series of HTCondor to the 8.8 series will bring new features introduced in the 8.7 series of HTCondor. These new features include the following (note that this list contains only the most significant changes; a full list of changes can be found in the version history: 11.5):

• condor_annex is tool to help users and administrators use cloud resources to run HTCondor jobs. It automates the processes of acquiring those resources, securely configuring them to safely join the local pool, and ensuring that they shut down when up or idle for too long. It presently works only with AWS.
• The Python bindings now include submit functionality. (Ticket #6679). (Ticket #6649).
• Added a new tool, condor_now, which tries to run the specified job now. You specify two jobs that you own from the same condor_schedd: the now-job and the vacate-job. The latter is immediately vacated; after the vacated job terminates, if the condor_schedd still has the claim to the vacated job’s slot (and it usually will), the condor_schedd will immediately start the now-job on that slot. The now-job must be idle and the vacate-job must be running. If you’re a queue super-user, the jobs must have the same owner, but that owner doesn’t have to be you. (Ticket #6659).
• Provides a new package, minicondor on Red Hat based systems and minihtcondor on Debian and Ubuntu based systems. This mini-HTCondor package configures HTCondor to work on a single machine. (Ticket #6823).
• HTCondor now tracks and reports GPU Usage and GPU memory usage. (Ticket #6477). (Ticket #6544).
• Several performance enhancements in the collector.
• The grid universe can now be used to create and manage VM instances in Microsoft Azure, using the new grid type azure. (Ticket #6176).
• Added support for both user and daemon authentication using the MUNGE service. The MUNGE security method is now supported on all Linux platforms. (Ticket #6404).

Upgrading from the 8.6 series of HTCondor to the 8.8 series will also introduce changes that administrators and users of sites running from an older HTCondor version should be aware of when planning an upgrade. Here is a list of items that administrators should be aware of.

• In the Job Router, when a candidate job matches multiple routes, the first route is now always selected. The old behavior of spreading jobs across all matching routes round-robin style can be enabled by setting the new configuration parameter JOB_ROUTER_ROUND_ROBIN_SELECTION to True. (Ticket #6190).
• PREEMPTION_REQUIREMENTS in the negotiator no longer has a hard-coded check that the preempting user has a better fair-share user priority than the running user. (Ticket #4699).

  Overly-lax expressions (True being the worst) will lead to slots being preempted every negotiation cycle. One of the following clauses should be in the expression:

  For pools with fair-share only:

    RemoteUserPrio > TARGET.SubmitterUserPrio * 1.2

  For pools with groups and quotas:

    (SubmitterGroupResourcesInUse < SubmitterGroupQuota) && (RemoteGroupResourcesInUse > RemoteGroupQuota)

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