Dynamically host allocation in sge

Question

I have for example 20 computer cluster and 4 users. I want to provide users with 5 hosts (or N slots), but if not whole cluster is used users job can be run on other hosts/slots.

It is possible in sge6.2u2?

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you'd like each of your 4 users to have priority access to their own group of hosts, but also have access to the other hosts when idle. I don't know how to achieve this exact effect, but you can get something similar using subordinate queues.

1. Make sure all of the exec hosts are in a global queue called all.q.

2. For each of your users, create a queue, i.e. user1.q, user2.q, etc.

3. In each user queue, add "all.q" to the list of subordinate queues. The entry will look something like "all.q=3", and means that jobs in all.q will be suspended if more than 3 slots are used in user.q.

4. Add only hosts in each user's "high priority" list to their corresponding queue.

Then if your user submits their job to all.q, they will run on the whole cluster; but jobs submitted to their user queue can override these, so that users have priority access to their own nodes.