[auton-users] NEW FEATURE: Job Priority Reservation

[Michael J. Baysek]

As of today, there is a new type of reservation available that I am 
calling Job Priority Reservation.  This new reservation type allows us 
to specify the priority of a job over (or under) other jobs that may 
later be running on a machine.

Most of you know you can run your jobs nicely when you have a low 
priority job to run.  This is great except we don't always remember to 
do this.

One thing you could not previously do is specify to the machine that 
your job is _more_ important that other jobs running on the system. 
This is what we now have the ability to do.

This reservation type does not reserve the entire machine to you, and 
therefore should not be used for timing jobs.  It simply ensures that 
you will have priority access to resources if the machines are under 
heavy load.

Technical details
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Hourly, a process scans a machine for jobs that match predefined 
criteria and renice them to match the system policy.  If your job is 
listed as high priority, it will be elevated to high priority status at 
the top of the hour.

Using this New Feature
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To take advantage of this feature you need to have your job registered 
into the system.  This is something that I can do for you.  I will need 
to know the format of how your job appears in a ps auxw statement.

The system policy is automatically propogated to all of the 
lop,loq,lor,and los machines, so it will be effective on any machine you 
decide to run on.



-- 

Michael J. Baysek
Systems Analyst
Carnegie Mellon University, Auton Lab
http://www.autonlab.org
mjbaysek at cs.cmu.edu