Extraordinary Resource Request
- Cristian Di Pietrantonio
On rare occasions, it may be necessary to bypass the standard job queuing and prioritisation on Pawsey supercomputers. For example, interactively debugging a 1000-core job during business hours, running a rare job that exceeds the default maximum walltime, or urgently generating results for a conference presentation.
Send a request with justification to the Pawsey Helpdesk Service. Requests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The frequency and usage of past requests are also taken into account.
Priority boosting
Priority boosting sets a job into a "high" priority mode, bypassing the normal prioritisation of jobs based on fairshare, job age and job size. Priority boosting is best used for normal jobs that are required to be run urgently, such as for a conference presentation, or for running short test jobs.
Users can perform this priority boosting themselves in some cases. Check the system-specific pages for details on how high-priority mode is implemented on each of the supercomputers at Pawsey. If high priority mode is not available to you, submit an extraordinary resource request to the helpdesk with justification for the priority boosting.
Job resource request changes
The resource request associated with a job can be modified by system administrators once the job is in the queue. For example, running a job once-off that will exceed the default maximum walltime.
For this mechanism, send the request and justification to the helpdesk. If the request is approved, you will be asked to submit the job and reply with the job ID.
Reservations
In a reservation, specific nodes are reserved at a specific time. Reservations are best suited for activities such as interactive debugging on many nodes, where you want to run at a certain time of day rather than waiting an unknown amount of time for your session to start.
Reservations must be booked at least 72 hours in advance. Reservations must be scheduled to start during Pawsey office hours so that they can be monitored for usage and to have started correctly. Consult the user guide on how to submit jobs to a reservation.
The entire time of the reservation will be charged against your project, unless you contact the Pawsey helpdesk requesting the reservation be cancelled and the helpdesk acts on this. The helpdesk makes no guarantees on how quickly it can respond. The use of reservations is discouraged because of this potential waste of resources.
Since reservations are for specific nodes, they are susceptible to node issues. If one node is lost before the reservation begins, then the whole reservation becomes invalid and will need to be rescheduled for another day. Reservations are also discouraged because they interfere with the efficient scheduling of the jobs of other users.