Given the new set of visualization tools available in JIST as part of the Vent project, it would be nice to have a flag in the plug-ins that indicates a job is not mandatory to batch, and can be excluded when the user starts the scheduler to schedule all jobs. The reason for this is that the visualization plug-ins are blocking so if they are executed as part of a pipeline, the process manager will pause indefinitely until the user exits the visualization window. This can be really annoying, and the only way to handle it right now is to sort the tasks by name and manually exclude those visualization tasks from the batch run. It would be nice to add a menu option that says "Schedule Mandatory Tasks Only" so visualization tasks are automatically excluded.

Moving this to a feature request.

That would work, as long as the user doesn't have to manually set the priority for each job. An additional problem is that the Destination processor cannot run unless all jobs in the processing thread have completed. Right now, the user will have to manually run each visualization plug-in before spreadsheets can be generated :-(.

Is there a reason that we couldn't use the existing priority structure and allow a module to self-declare +10^9 priority (or something similar)?

There already exists a task priority feature in JIST that allows the user to adjust the priority of jobs. Maybe JIST could have two modes "Batch" and "Interactive." Interactive mode will include the Visualization plug-ins whereas Batch would not.

Do you think a more general "priority" number would be useful?

How else might the optional/mandatory feature be used?

Do we a "local only" versus "grid acceptable" option too?