Scheduling on Linux mostly happens with cron or any of it’s variations. Although cron is very powerful, it lacks a few features to use it in a flexible way and especially when you want to create dependencies or “communicate” with jobs running on other hosts, it has it’s shortcomings. Cron wasn’t really designed with those features in mind. Fortunately there are a few nice schedulers out there which can be used to overcome those limitations. A few of them are SOS Jobscheduler, GNUBatch and openlava. Openlava is a limited open source fork of LSF which is now owned by IBM. Openlava doesn’t come with a GUI but there is another project, Openlava web which enables control over openlava via a web interface.

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