[Condor-users] On-demand priority access to resources

["Ian Chesal" <ICHESAL@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A colleague asked a similar question without any answers, so I thought
I'd try rephrasing things.

We are wondering how, in the Condor world, the following scenario is
handled:

I have lots of users and lots of machines in the Condor pool. All users
run vanilla jobs of varying length, between 1-10 hours  of comuptation
time long. User A suddenly has a very, very important experiment that
must take priority over all the other jobs in the system. How do you let
User A trump all other jobs? Based on Condor's manual and the
description of the decaying user priority it would seem that User A
would have "save up" system time by not submitting jobs for a few days
and letting their user priority reset to the highest value.

What if waiting for the user priority to reset wasn't an option? How
does User A gain full access to all the resources and trump everyone
else? Do the condor admins have to intervene to broker this type of
priority access or can User A do something to indicate this one
experiment is the top priority regardless of user priorities?

Any insight into how Condor behaves, or how others manage large Condor
installations with a large user base, would be greatly appreciated.

Ian

--
Ian R. Chesal <ichesal@xxxxxxxxxx>
Senior Software Engineer

Altera Corporation
Toronto Technology Center
Tel: (416) 926-8300