When using the sync option in SGE, you may see errors

If you see one of the following errors:

[ERROR] 2013-03-06 15:27:40,134 [pbpy.smrtpipe.engine.SmrtPipeTasks run 655] > Unable to initialize environment because of error: cannot register event client. Only 99 event clients are allowed in the system

[ERROR] 2013-05-02 10:22:07,119 [pbpy.smrtpipe.engine.SmrtPipeTasks run 655] > Unable to initialize environment because of error: range_list containes no elements

The errors occur when the number of dynamic event client processes have exceeded the limit defined in your job scheduler configuration. (Each qsub sync -y is a dynamic event client.)

The solution is to increase the value assigned to MAX_DYN_EC (the maximum number of dynamic event clients) in qmaster_params. The default is 99 on some systems, but more recent versions of SGE have this increased to 500.

To get current MAX_DYN_EC settings:

$ qconf -sconf | grep MAX_DYN_EC
qmaster_params               MAX_DYN_EC=500

(This value may not be set on some systems.)

To set the MAX_DYN_EC value, for example, to 1000:

$ qconf -mconf qmaster_params MAX_DYN_EC=1000

If this does not fix the issue, use the qsw.py script instead.