School-district thesis jobs starve while weekend scrapers run. What Slurm admin change favors thesis work?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You can give thesis jobs a better place in the GPU queue by raising fairshare or priority weights for thesis accounts relative to weekend scrapers. Stopping the controller or disabling accounting undermines scheduling, while giving scrapers root does not help prioritize thesis work.
Full Explanation
In a school-district Slurm cluster where thesis jobs compete with weekend scrapers, raising fairshare or priority weights for thesis accounts relative to scraper accounts is the administrative change that favors thesis work. Fairshare reflects account usage history, while priority weights influence how pending jobs are ranked; adjusting them lets the scheduler prefer thesis jobs when resources are contested. Stopping the controller whenever scrapers submit does not free resources in a useful, targeted way: it interrupts scheduling for everyone, including thesis jobs. Disabling accounting removes the information needed to measure usage and tune fairshare, so it works against the requested priority policy. Giving scrapers root on GPU login nodes grants excessive privilege and does not improve their jobs’ position in the queue. Exam caveat: a priority change affects scheduling preference, not GPU capacity, so thesis jobs may still wait when all suitable resources are occupied. Practical check: after adjusting the thesis-account weights, compare pending thesis and scraper jobs under load with Slurm’s queue and priority reports, and confirm thesis jobs rank ahead without stopping the controller, disabling accounting, or granting scrapers root.