362. Sun Grid Engine: Limit number of running jobs for a user

I don't like copying a post verbatim, but I also want to make sure that I keep track of what I do on my shared cluster, and that I don't forget how to set user based job limits.

Andi Broka made an excellent post at https://lists.sdsc.edu/pipermail/npaci-rocks-discussion/2010-November/049905.html in which two methods were shown (see below).

Resource quota management in general is covered here these days: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/820-0698/gehwk/index.html

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1. Number of running jobs: limit for ALL users
Modify the scheduler configuration:

qconf -msconf

2 schedule_interval                 0:0:15
3 maxujobs                          0
4 queue_sort_method                 load

Change maxujobs from 0 (unlimited) to a suitable value.

The m in -msconf stands for modify, conf stands for configuration, and the s stands for scheduler.

2. Number of running jobs: limit for a particular user
Modify the resource quota set(s):

qconf -mrqs

1 {
2    name         verahill
3    description  "specific limitations for user verahill"
4    enabled      TRUE
5    limit        users verahill to slots=40
6 }

Again, the -m is for modify, and rqs is for resource quota set(s).

Note that slots are the number of processes and not nodes -- 40 slots allows me to use five 8-core nodes.