Kraken and Athena use TORQUE and Moab to schedule jobs. NICS is constantly reviewing the scheduling policies in order to adapt and better serve users.
Because of the unique large computing capacity of Kraken, the scheduler will give preference to large core count jobs. Moab is configured to do “first fit” backfill. Backfilling allows smaller, shorter jobs to use otherwise idle resources.
Users can alter certain attributes of queued jobs until they start running. The order in which jobs are run is dependent on the following factors:
- number of cores requested--jobs that request more cores get a higher priority.
- queue wait time--A job's priority increases as the time it waits to run.
- account balance--jobs that use an account with a negative balance will have significantly lowered priority.
- number of jobs--a maximum of five jobs per user, at a time, will be eligible to run. The rest will be blocked.
- In certain special cases, the priority of a job may be manually increased upon request. To request priority change you may contact NICS User Support. NICS will need the job ID and reason to submit the request.
