[Beowulf] scheduler policy design

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Tim Cutts wrote:

> But if your users, like mine, can't or won't supply this information

... or would supply some meaningless values...

For example, if the queue is limited to 24h maximum runtime and they 
would set 24h as their requirement, thinking that it would certainly 
cover what they want and the job would not run anyway longer than 
that, as it would be killed by the scheduler. Even when they run sets 
of identical jobs, for which they could very well predict the needed 
runtime after the first 1 or a few jobs have finished... And the most 
painful part is that quite of lot of these users also feel very 
strongly that they are doing nothing wrong: they set a value which is 
less-or-equal than the maximum allowed, "so it's got to be right, no ?"
(obviously, if the queue limit would be set to something different 
(say 12h) they would simply adjust to the new value ;-)).

So, when the majority of submitted jobs are of this type, is there any 
point in having a smart scheduler in the first place ?

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu at IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De