🚀 go-pugleaf

soraya rana (rana@flatt.cs.colostate.edu) wrote:

: Well, it was only a matter of time before a grad student jumped into this
: conversation...

: I saw the process that Tony was talking about -- and it seems pretty
: bizarre.  Before posting messages to a newsgroup with complaints, it is
: far more effective to just ask the user (in this case, subin) if he
: knows he has a process running (and hogging) these machines.  If he
: doesn't kill the job or explain what is going on then you should submit
: a trouble report and get the Systems people involved.  Complaining
: on a newsgroup can make more people aware of the problem, but it
: doesn't necessarily mean anything will be done to solve the problem.

Awareness is what I wanted to achieve.  The people that are hogging
the resources may not know how it is affecting the performance for
those of us who are sitting at and trying to use the machines.

We now have several machines that are nice to work on.  They
probably aren't the fastest machines in the department, either.  A
bunch of interactive users can easily share the resources of these
machines, but a couple of people can completely destroy the
performance by running CPU-intensive batch processes on them full
time.

: In the defense of the graduate students, the vast majority of graduate 
: students do NOT run processes on the general machines because there are 
: faster machines that are SUPPOSED to be used for cycle crunching.

To clarify, I am *NOT* picking on graduate students!  Some of the people
running these programs are graduate students, some are undergraduates.  It
isn't even fair to single out the people doing it THIS week because it
has been a problem in the past.

And, as Corby said, if people need to use the spare CPU cycles of
these machines they should reduce the priority such that the
interactive users of the machines are less affected.  These time consuming
processes may take 12 days running at normal user-level priority and maybe
14 days running at a much lower priority.  That would really help the
interactive users, at not much of a price.

I totally agree that the computers sit idle much of the time, and we
shouldn't waste those resources.  Utilizing the the resources should
be done in such a way that it minimizes the impact on the system's
interactive users.