Deprioritizing interactive jobs with 0 wall-clock time

Users/Site Administrators
1

Dear all,
I am discussing with the system administrators of my local HPC center.
There are some users who are abusing the interactive mode to lock access GPU and CPU time, and they are not using any resources (probably they are just runnning RStudio and coding).
The problem is that they are locking the resources for days, and the users who needs to run CPU and GPU intensive jobs are waiting in the queue.

Is there a way to configure PBS to perform preemption of the jobs that locked the GPU+CPU for some times, while they are actually NOT using the resources they locked? I am fine to have if they get priority again when their process is running instructions.

Thanks.

2

Hi

You could set the interactive queue priority to be low, say 100 and set resources_default.preempt_targets = “QUEUE=interq” for the other queues. But there is quite a bit of changes to do to get it to work and it makes your setup more complex. I’d suggest to try simpler things first.

What I have for my interactive queue is set the resources_max.walltime to be just 6 hours, the ncpus=15, mem=20GB and max_run=2 and max_queued=2
That way its really only good for testing and some RStudio, VSCode running, checking a small test run would work etc. Nothing very computationally hard so it does not get abused.

Mike