[Condor-users] Limiting jobs to certain time

["Robert E. Parrott" <parrott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

We have a recurrent issue where users submit jobs that will run for  
over a month, and that can't be checkpointed in the standard  
universe, but could be by using custom checkpointing, or  
functionality for saving "workspace" in packages such as R or Matlab.

The present problem with these long running jobs is that the chance  
of completion decreases nearly exponentially in time with fair share  
condor scheduling, and with simple system instabilities. As such  
these jobs take often 10 times more CPU time than necessary, and tend  
to clog up the queues. Often users abandon them because they don't  
complete.

To help most users reconsider this approach, we'd like to limit the  
total time used for any given vanilla job to a total of something  
like 24 hours.

How would we code this in condor's configuration language?

thanks,
rob