CSAR Bulletin issued in January 2004

Newton Job Scheduling

As a result of the requirements expressed through the CSAR User Steering Group meeting on 5th January 2004 it has been agreed that a number of changes should be made to job scheduling on Newton:

Development Queue

A development queue has been introduced to give improved turnaround for short, small jobs. The limits on this queue are 30 minutes and 16 processors. Please use this in preference to the normal queues where suitable. These parameters are subject to change according to demand and will impact the number of CPUs available for normal large batch jobs. To access this development queue you should specify the queue ndev: #BSUB -q ndev

New Time Limits

The maximum time limit for jobs on Newton will be reduced to 12 hours from 00:00 Monday through to 19:00 Friday. The 24 hour limit will remain from 19:00 Friday until midnight Sunday. This policy will be in operation from Monday 26th January. This is intended to enable consortia to better share resources on Newton and to enable large processor jobs to commence more frequently.

Large Jobs

In order to ensure that jobs requesting a large number of processors are run frequently it is intended that, if necessary, the system will be run down to enable such jobs to start. The target times will be Tuesday and Thursday nights and at the weekend, although actual times will depend upon jobs in the system. If you wish to run a number of such jobs, particularly of short duration, you are encouraged to submit them at the same time to minimise the number of rundowns.

Accurate Job Times

Users are strongly encouraged to specify job times as accurately as possible to assist in the best possible scheduling of jobs. Note in particular that if the system is being rundown either to run large jobs or for maintenance, you may be able to do more work by running jobs of shorter duration, providing they complete before the rundown time. Please note that it may be necessary to subsequently change some of these limits as the service develops and the characteristics of the workload change.

Origin Systems: Upgrade to MPT

The default version of mpt on the Origins will be upgraded to mpt 1.8 on Tuesday 10th February. You can use this version now or revert to the current version after this upgrade by using the module swap command, for example

module swap mpt mpt.1.8