[Beowulf] Users abusing screen

[Peter St. John]

I think Greg is right on the money. Particularly at a place like IAS, where
resources are good and users may be errant but are doing great things, I'd
have a sequence of limits; first, a mail warning ("Your job PID 666 has
consumed one million core hours, and its priority will be decremented in
500,000 CH unless you call the sysadmin at 555-1212") and later nice (iwith
another email warning) and only then kill (with an email notificiation). If
they have opportunities to upscale the allocations to really important jobs,
and they are notified about automatic limitations ahead of time, they have
no reason to complain.
Peter

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 1:41 AM, Greg Lindahl <lindahl at pbm.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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