gridengine.info

A list message posted by Andreas back in June has a link to an overlooked yet quite interesting Grid Engine Design document. It includes the following definition of terms:

   Resource Reservation 
      A job-specific reservation created by the scheduler for pending 
      jobs. During the reservation the resources are blocked for lower 
      priority jobs.

   Backfilling
      The process of starting jobs of the job priority list despite of 
      higher priority pending jobs that might own a future reservation 
      with the same resource. Thus backfilling has a meaning only in the 
      context of Resource Reservation or Advance Reservation.

   Advance Reservation
      A reservation (possibly independent of a particular job) that can 
      be requested by a user or administrator and gets created by the 
      scheduler. The reservation causes the associated resources be blocked
      for other jobs.

   Preemption
      The process of interrupting job executions in order to free resources
      for particular jobs.

… good terms to know, especially when reading through the SGE docs and mailing list messages. The entire document makes for interesting reading.