Allocations and compute scheduling: Difference between revisions

The overarching principle governing the calculation of priority on Alliance's national clusters is that compute-based jobs are considered in the calculation based on the resources that others are prevented from using and not on the resources actually used.

Allocation target tracking is straightforward when requests to use resources on the clusters are made entirely of core and memory amounts that can be portioned only into complete equivalent cores. Things become more complicated when jobs request portions of a core equivalent because it is possible to have many points counted against a research group’s allocation, even when they are using only portions of core equivalents. In practice, the method used by Alliance to account for system usage solves problems about fairness and perceptions of fairness but unfortunately the method is not initially intuitive.