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[Condor-users] allowing jobs to run alongside interactive users (was Re: condor on windows)



If people are interested in trying this, there are two important startd policy config settings I'd recommend:

1) set JOB_RENICE_INCREMENT=20 so that, if the Condor job is competing with an interactive user, the interactive user will get the overwhelming majority of CPU time at Condor's expense.

2) set your SUSPEND expression to suspend the condor job if there is an interactive user *and* the machine's free memory drops below a certain threshold. This will prevent the situation alluded to below, where the Condor job affects an interactive user through its memory use, rather than its CPU use.

Good luck!

-Peter



On Apr 8, 2005, at 11:54 AM, John Wheez wrote:

This is true. I sometimes do work on my Windows computer as a condor job runs in the background on Windows. You do run the risk of having a job fail though if the students are doing tasks which are very RAM intensive or if they crash the computer....

some people report that if you use mapped drives, the drive mapping willbe lost to the condor user when the student logs in...i've not really noticed this on my system..so do a test first of course.

your students will also notice tha teh computer can be slow and slugish if the background task is demanding. If you have a dual cpu system you can try to send condor tasks to one cpu and leave the ther cpu available for the student tasks.

JW



Masao Fujinaga wrote:

At the recent condor week, I heard people talking about running condor jobs in the background in student labs running windows. They said that as long as the jobs did not use a lot of memory, the interactive users did not notice the presence of the condor jobs running. If this were the case, it would be a great improvement to putting the jobs to sleep whenever there was an interactive user. Has anybody documented this minimal impact of condor jobs? We would use such a document as argument to the people responsible of our labs to let us run condor continuously.

Masao

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Masao Fujinaga | Research Computing Support
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Peter Couvares                        University of Wisconsin-Madison
Condor Project Research               Department of Computer Sciences
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