Topic: Common Background Queue Policy
Date Received: July 5, 2008

I have found many of the programs completed projects have helped me including common work directory names, availability of open source software like lapack, blas, and papi. An easy way to monitor account usage with show_usage, and do on.

Centers: I work on the ARSC, AFRDC. ERDC.

Comments: It would be useful to have a common background queue policy in terms of priorities and usage. At some centers like ARSC and ERDC, the policy is such that background jobs run, with limitations on the total amount of procs that can be running background jobs, so the queues actually run and use up significant amount of "dead time" on the machines. Other centers, like AFRDC, have such restrictive policies on the background queues, that those jobs essentially never run, and machines are more idle.

It would be useful to try to uniformize these policies to maximize the use of the DOD HPC resources.

BC Team Feedback
Reply Date: June 2, 2009

This is a follow up to the note you sent to the BC team on July 5, 2008. It has taken us a long time to get back to you. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the delay.

We are, however, very pleased to inform you that a revised version of BC policy FY05-05 (Common Queue Names) has been released on our Web site. The updated version of the policy incorporates the following two changes:

  1. The table with "Queue Names" and "Priority Class" has been expanded by an additional column providing a diversity of worthwhile information relating to the six queues;
  2. The HPC Centers Unclassified Systems page provides information on "Max Wall Clock Time," "Max Cores per Job," and also on "Priority" for all three queues "standard," "debug" and "background," on all allocated machines at the six participating sites.

Also, your recommendation for commonality and the ease of restrictions on the usage of "background" queue to allow jobs run and make use of "dead time" on allocated machines at the participating sites, has been referred to the Workload Management Team (WMT). We are hoping that the WMT will fully address your concerns and get back to you in a timely fashion.

We thank you for your valued input, and hope that the updated version of BC policy FY05-05 eases some of the concerns you had raised in your e-mail to the BC team.