[slurm-users] Does a --nice value given to sbatch apply to just my own jobs or system wide?

[Terry Jones]

The man page for sbatch says this about the --nice option:

--nice[=adjustment]
>    Run the job with an adjusted scheduling priority within Slurm. With no
>    adjustment value the scheduling  priority  is  decreased  by 100.  A
>    negative nice value increases the priority, otherwise decreases it.
>    The adjustment range is +/- 2147483645. Only privileged users can
> specify
>    a negative adjustment.
>

Does the --nice adjustment just apply to jobs I submit, or does it figure
into a system-wide priority?

If it applies just to my own jobs, it's very useful because as a non-admin
user (who can't adjust jobs to have higher priority) I can submit regular
jobs with --nice and keep open the possibility of submitting higher
priority ones (without using --nice) later on. That's great, as my higher
priority jobs then don't have to wait behind the sometimes many thousands
of my other jobs.

But if --nice applies system wide, it's hard to imagine people using it. If
I did, and no one else does, I'm asking for my jobs to be run at a lower
priority than many, many jobs that are already in the system and which will
arrive in the meantime. I'm sure the job will run eventually, but...

Can someone confirm which of these is the case? Or is it more complicated
than that?

Thanks!

Terry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.schedmd.com/pipermail/slurm-users/attachments/20180416/a21300a1/attachment.html>