Be careful with your RQS syntax

Posted by chris Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:08:34 GMT

I believe pretty strongly that the 6.1 release is going to be a big deal, primarily because the new Resource Quota support in Grid Engine 6.1 is going to take a solid whack at a whole bunch problems and issues that SGE admins have been bothered by for years.

The nice clean resource quota syntax is going to replace entire bodies of clever hacks and workarounds that the developers, users and community have created. Many of the kludgy-yet-clever hacks involving the intentional (ahem...) misuse of custom parallel environment objects and dedicated queues will simply become obsolete.

RQS is going to take some getting used to, however as this mailing list discussion thread makes clear.

Now that people outside of the developer community are putting RQS through its pace it is becoming easier to spot areas where documentation can be improved and/or fixed. The discussion referenced above provided a great example, one that I'll turn into a little quiz for the reader:

What is the difference between the following 2 resource quota sets? 

{
   name peruser_limit
   enabled TRUE
   limit users * to slots = 10
}

{
   name peruser_limit
   enabled TRUE
   limit users {*} to slots = 10
}


The answer after the jump ...

Well this was not much of a quiz since the answer is contained in the mailing list thread but I'll summarize it here:

users * -- Means "apply limit globally across ALL users"
users {*} -- Means "apply limit INDIVIDUALLY to EACH user"

Something to think about as you start writing rule sets for 6.1!