Location of the Hosts File for a Job

When you start a job from the command line, one of the first tasks of Job Control is to locate a hosts file. The hosts file used for a given job is the first one found in the following list:

  • The file specified by the environment variable SCHRODINGER_HOSTS
  • The schrodinger.hosts file in the current directory
  • The schrodinger.hosts file in $HOME/.schrodinger (Linux/Mac) or
    %USERPROFILE%\Schrodinger (Windows)
  • The schrodinger.hosts file in the Schrödinger software installation

For MacroModel jobs the following locations are searched before the list given above:

1. A file specified by the command line argument -HOSTFILE.
2. The file jobname.hst in the startup directory on the submission host, where jobname is the stem of the command file name for the current calculation (e.g., if the command file were called cal_en1.com, this file would be called cal_en1.hst).

The information in the hosts file is then used to make default settings for the job, such as the location of the scratch directory.

If the hosts file is specified by the environment variable SCHRODINGER_HOSTS, this file is also used to locate the hosts for any subjobs.