[Beowulf] Users abusing screen

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 05:14:13PM -0400, Steve Crusan wrote:

> If the issue is processes that run for far too long, and are abusing
> the system, cgroups or 'pushing' the users to use a batch system seems
> to work better than writing scripts to make decisions on killing
> processes.

What I saw work well was nicing the process after a certain time,
including an email, and then killing and emailing after a longer
time. The emails can push the batch alternative. Users generally don't
become angry if the limits are enforced by a script; they can only be
surprised once, and that first time is just nicing the process. If
they have a hard time predicting runtime (a common issue, especially
for non-hardcore supercomputing types), it's not like they
_intentionally_ are exceeding the limits...

-- greg