Active condor user here. I wrote a script called maybe_sub.sh that submits jobs to condor to run in parallel if condor is available (hence ‘maybe’). You can see it here:
https://github.com/earlbellinger/asteroseismology/blob/master/scripts/maybe_sub.sh
You can do something like:
maybe_sub.sh -p 8 echo hi
which will execute echo hi using 8 processors on the cluster. In addition to running the program on the cluster as normal, it will create a directory called maybe_sub_logs which inside details the outputs of the calculation (“hi”). You can run maybe_sub.sh -h to see all the options.
I personally drop this file in a ~/scripts directory, make it executable (chmod +x maybe_sub.sh), and add ~/scripts to my $PATH variable in my .bashrc file so that I can call it from anywhere.
My workflow is to write a simple bash script for setting up my MESA job and then use maybe_sub.sh to execute that bash script optionally in parallel using the -p argument to specify the number of processors. The trick with MESA+condor is to send along the $OMP_NUM_THREADS variable to condor.
For example, in our recent paper [1], I made a quasirandom grid of main-sequence solar-like oscillators. For each combination of mass, metallicity, etc., I called a bash script called dispatch.sh which can be seen here:
https://github.com/earlbellinger/asteroseismology/blob/master/forward/dispatch.sh
On the compute nodes, it copies over my “mesa template,” changes the inlist settings to the desired properties, and runs the track in parallel. This would be called, for example, with:
maybe_sub.sh -p 4 dispatch.sh -M 1.2 -Z 0.001
to run a track with a mass of 1.2 and a metallicity of 0.001 using 4 processors.
To make a grid, I have a Python program called sobol_dispatcher.py:
https://github.com/earlbellinger/asteroseismology/blob/master/forward/sobol_dispatcher.py
which calls maybe_sub.sh on dispatch.sh with varied arguments, with something like:
bash_cmd = "maybe_sub.sh -p 2 ./dispatch.sh -M 0.9"
subprocess.Popen(bash_cmd.split(), shell=False)
You can write your own script (which I personally find good to do for each individual project at hand) or link up maybe_sub.sh to one of the existing MESA scripts.
Hope this is helpful.
[1] Earl P. Bellinger & George C. Angelou et al., “Fundamental Parameters of Main-Sequence Stars in an Instant with Machine Learning,” 2016 ApJ 830 31,
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJ…830…31B
Best regards,
Earl Bellinger