for running various jobs on a server, what software for queuing is recommended? what do people think about pbs-pro?

PBS-Pro is very good.

LSF is also very good.

Torque is an open source version of a manager that is very similar to PBS without as many bells and whistles that might be OK if you don't need the extra features and don't need any commercial support.

Sun's Grid Engine is also open source I believe and quite capable.

You should check your applications first to see which resource manager they work with before you pick one.

great info! what do u mean by to see which resource manager?

Batch queuing and resource manager generally means the same thing, but a resource manager is more than just a queue to execute jobs in the order they are submitted. They are capable of looking at how many processors you need, how many are available, how much memory you ask for, ... and then schedule jobs in a intelligent order. Many commercial applications pack a small amount of code or scripting to make it easy to run the program within a batch queuing environment like PBS or LSF, but they all don't support every batch queue system out there. Some of them are integrated quite closely with a system to allow for example, automatic checkpointing, and others are integrated on a very simple level or not at all. If your main application does not support PBS, but does support LSF, then you would probably want to choose LSF.

thank you very much, that was informative!

I hope PBS(Torque) is very comfortable for creating queues, allocating nodes for particular users or jobs...Sungrid Engine is mettle as compared to torque.

Hi Velan, i heard about gridengine too. It is free isn't it?

I hope you are talking about sungrid engine. Yes both Torque and sungridengine are free. There will be slight difference while writing job submission script (Batch mode) between Torque and Sungrid Engine. I never tried SGE, but i familiar with PBS.