The chief purpose of host profiles is to make launching compute engines easier. This is even more the case when host profiles are used to launch parallel compute engines on large computers that often have complex scheduling programs that determine when parallel jobs can be executed. It is easy to forget how to use the scheduling programs on a large computer because each scheduling program requires different arguments. In order to make launching compute engines easy, VisIt hides the details of the scheduling program used to launch parallel compute engines. VisIt instead allows you to set some common parallel options and then figures out how to launch the parallel compute engine on the specified computer using the parallel options specified in the host profile. Furthermore, once you create a host profile that works for a computer, you rarely need to modify it.
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Figure 6 |